Beautiful Streets

Streets, squares, mews and lanes. The most charming streetscapes in London. Some well known, some hidden gems.

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Brick Lane

Not a tidy street. Curry houses, bagels at four in the morning, and every wave of arrivals still written on it.

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Banksy's three monkeys on the railway bridge, up overnight in August 2024.

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Brick Lane is not beautiful the way the other streets here are beautiful. It is scruffy and loud, the shutters are under layers of paint and fly-posters, and on a Monday morning the whole lane smells of the night before. What earns it a place is everything that has passed down it. Each wave of arrivals in Spitalfields left something on this street: Huguenot silk weavers, French Protestants who had fled Catholic France, then Jewish tailors out of eastern Europe and the two bagel shops that still trade through the night, then families from Sylhet in Bangladesh whose restaurants gave the southern end its second name, Banglatown. The Old Truman Brewery halfway along has record shops and a Sunday market that spills into the side streets, and the walls have been a public gallery of street art for twenty years. The building on the corner of Fournier Street carries the whole story by itself: put up in 1743 as a Huguenot chapel, a synagogue from 1891, and the London Jamme Masjid since 1976. High on its wall the Huguenots fixed a sundial, with two words cut beneath it. Umbra Sumus. We are shadows.

Where
Brick Lane, E1
Nearest station
Shoreditch High Street · 4 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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