When: 24th January Start time: 2PM Duration: 2 hours. Meeting Point: Outside Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road London E1 6LA End Point: The City of London Cost: £8. Ticket: Reservations: info@billaitchison.co.ukWear: Warm clothing After: cafe/bar to thaw and discuss
A long time in the making, the East London Tour of All Tours finally hit the streets last weekend.
The tour is up and running and manages to include most of the tours that were taken in the Shoreditch and City area towards the end of 2013 and which are reviewed on this blog. The arm pointing up high is to Broadgate Tower.
In the background is the work of Space Invader and a stop on the food tour. As was typical in Stuttgart, locations accumulate multiple perspectives with a number of tours having a go at defining them.
The weather was bright and sunny and the addition of a hat proved to be most useful to say nothing of its elegance.
Something that I hoped would happen did: we encountered some other groups on route who I was able to identify and describe. This makes me think that a flexible structure which allows me to talk about tours when the group appears in front of us is great and when we are on the tour and don't see them, which is more typical, to still have a solid plan. I've gone some way to allowing enough spaces and options into this tour for this to happen but still need to get used to these encounters to play them fully for all they are worth.
The locations proved to offer a very large dynamic range, particularly on the Sunday when Brick Lane was heaving with people and The City completely deserted.
There is still another weekend of tours to come and it will no doubt still evolve a bit more. Bookings via Richmix. I must thank two people in particular, Elo Masing for supplying some of these pictures and Rosa Farber for assisting with the trial runs and for also providing some of these images. Thank you!
I should begin by first making my excuses
for this being a tour taken well over a week ago that has only now made it
online. I relocated to Beijing while writing this one up and this blog is
blocked there along with a great many other seditious online publications, so
it has taken a little while to figure out how to get around this impasse. I
couldn’t pass this tour off as yesterday’s as it began with a topical sales
pitch in Shoreditch Station, where I had arranged to meet my guide. A young man
and woman from Beauty Group were stopping passers by and telling them they were
lucky enough to be one of the first 25 customers of the morning and could thus
take advantage of a tremendous cosmetics offer. Yes, for just £35 I could have
walked away with a little black bag bristling with cosmetics that would
otherwise have cost me over £100, a perfect Valentine’s Day present, etc. She
did her best and I watched as she demonstrated the various pastes, powders,
glosses and pencils but my heart wasn’t in it. It was still a £35 sale and when
I saw the two of them still there over two hours later I started to doubt the
‘first 25 customers’ line and suspected it was more a device to inject a sense
of urgency and exclusivity into what, for me, was at best an only moderately
interesting offer.
The station was not only animated by Beauty
Group, there was also a tour group assembling there and it was only after they
departed that I found my guide Charli who was sporting a purple Walk Eat Talk Eat jacket. She led me
out, past the group who had now descended fully into the history of old
Shoreditch, and onto Bethnal Green Road. We introduced ourselves and it turned
out I had some choices and options of where my tour would take me. Not eating
meat this meant avoiding some places but with so many other options available I
was not short of places to talk and eat.
Our first stop was bunnychow a South African themed fast-food
outlet in Box Park. We got started straight away ordering a ‘Boston Beans’, a
hollowed-out bread roll filled with beans, spinach and halloumi cheese served
in a box. It was rather good and I started to regret having eaten that porridge
for breakfast as I was only slightly hungry and if we were setting out at this
pace and there were still 4 or 5 stops to come I knew I’d be struggling soon.
This was not symbolic food or light tasting to accompany a story, this was the
real deal and I was tucking into a second breakfast.
We then got talking to the chef who told us
about the food, its origins, how he came to be making it and about the business
here in Shoreditch. This got us onto the crossover between street food and
restaurants, the festival circuit and much more besides. It was a pleasure to
drop briefly into his world and hear in detail about something I might only
otherwise miss entirely. There is something quite nice in general about this
structure of tour where you get picked up and dropped in front of a number of
people who stop and talk to you for a minute and then carry on about their
business while your guide whisks you to the next one.
Our next stop however did not feature any
interviews; we ducked into Albion
and I was invited to choose an item from the bakery table. The selection was of
familiar British items like scones, macaroons and bakewell tarts but somewhat
unfamiliar in that these had been well made elevating them above the Mr
Kipling’s box of six. I plumped for the bourbon biscuit.
For a place that is branded as British, Albion seemed surprisingly continental European in tone which, I should add, I see as no bad thing. The espresso machine jumped out at me and made me have to ask, “what is British food?” Coffee, as I heard in a previous tour, has a longer history in Britain than tea so in a sense coffee is a very solid part of the British tradition as it has been consumed in this country for many hundreds of years. On the other hand, the beans are grown far away with packets sporting labels like ‘Produce of Kenya’ and coffee culture has only recently been re-embraced here in the UK where until fifteen years ago, it was pretty much instant coffee or nothing. What’s more, the idea of Britain is itself a historical construct; in the stone age, people ate and drank, not cappuccinos I suppose, but our Neolithic tribes consumed something and people were not busy with the idea of Britain let alone British food, that came much later. The idea of Britain that seems to be most in circulation today is one that is historically located in the period of the British Empire. Here in Albion they were improvising upon this theme but doing so in a contemporary way, a far cry from the Britain of the 1970s and 80s that I grew up in, a land of luncheon meat, spam and inedible school dinners. Today’s spam is electronic and today’s Britain articulated in relation to Europe.
Stopping outside on the street the focus of
the tour now switched to history and I was told about Jack London’s
visit here at the turn of the century and how Thomas Cook refused to offer
him a tour so much was this considered a no go zone for respectable persons.
Yes, at the height of empire some parts of the capital remained in desperate
poverty. Indeed even the police, so Charli told me, would not venture into this
cesspool of crime and deprivation. Times have changed! It is a designer
shopping and creative industries hub with tour guides a plenty and now, with
the Tour of All Tours focused here, it even has its conceptual tour guide,
guiding the visitor around the guides. A sign of the beginning of the end? As
we went further into The Boundary Estate and I was told about the efforts of
early reformers to improve the district I munched on my quite delicious bourbon
biscuit and tried to find sense in these multiple impressions and stories. This
evaded me as the place IS as ruptured and in flux as all that and a tour that
works off this premise will inevitably have to both feed them and tell them
some of the stories.
We stopped for street art around Brick Lane
but did not linger too long or get deep into the street art scene as the more
dedicated tours of it do.
Next stop was a new chocolate shop on Brick
Lane. We were meant to talk to the owner but she was in the midst of an
involved business call (i.e. an argument) so we simply admired the high-end
chocolates and ordered a chilli hot chocolate. This turned out to be another
calorie hit with just enough chilli to wake the mouth up but not so much as to
destroy the flavour of the chocolate.
Next came the piadina. This is an Italian
fast food served up in a van behind Truman’s brewery. This seemed to be a
family run outfit with fresh ingredients brought back from Italy every week, I
was told.
What made this stop interesting for me was
watching the food being made in front of us. It can be fascinating to watch
somebody skilled in preparing fast food at work and while this was not so
challenging a dish to make it was good to watch the process all the same. There
is a rather tasty Beijing egg pancake with coriander, chilli paste and a dried
tofu sheet that is made fresh in front of you here and it sends me into the
same low-level hypnosis watching the vendors at work.
We made the near obligatory stop outside
the mosque to hear about multiculturalism and were stood beside the Bangladeshi
sweet shop to check out their offerings. The man in the background is arriving
there carrying two trays laden with brightly coloured spirals of sugar and fat.
We could have gotten some but I declined already knowing these sweets and
feeling rather full from the onslaught so far. It would be interesting to make
a calorie count of the tour and see what it came to, to then subtract the
amount exerted in walking and discover the net balance. Applying this logic,
what would be required to make a calorific neutral walking and eating tour? A
stick of celery every 200 meters? I
guess that wouldn’t take on, not even with hardened vegans. This idea of
neutrality is nonetheless an appealing one with carbon neutral travel and
carbon neutral companies making much of their balancing equations, or I
sometimes suspect, cooking of the books.
We sheltered under a coffee stall outside
Spitalfields Church as the weather turned properly grim and I got some
historical stories about the church and surrounding area. Stepping over the
road I ran into Bill Gee by chance, Bill who is co-curating Inside Out Festival in South
Dorset where I’m also making a tour for this Summer. It was funny for him to
catch me hard at work researching one of my other tours. Walking through the
gastronomically homogenized Spitalfields Market (over-run by chain restaurants
like Giraffe and Leon) we arrived at another British themed food store A. Gold on Brushfield Street which caters
to city workers and proudly displays all the old brands. I got half a scotch
egg which I prudently saved for later. One of the themes of the walk is that
‘British food is not half as bad as people make it out to be’ and on the basis
of this tour you could definitely agree with this sentiment. Granted, there are
horror kitchens up and down the country, millions of people buy ready to
microwave slops from supermarkets and you can still pick up a deep fried mars
bar, if you know where to look, but that does not change the fact that there is
a quality British cuisine and that it is not indelibly bland but actually
rather good. The tour used food as the principal hook to get you from place to
place and tell stories not just about food but also about the area on the way.
While it can sometimes feel a bit split between these two focuses, for most
visitors they are only going to ever take one tour of Brick Lane and combining
food and local history is a way to make the experience as a whole an agreeable
one. I felt that the history of empire and social class loomed large over what
I experienced, yet a tour that articulated this in depth would be a very
different sort of tour and quite probably not so enjoyable a one. My one piece
of advice for would be tourists taking the Walk Eat Talk Eat Tour is to approach
this one on an empty stomach, there’s a lot to take in.
Last weekend I made an experiment to test out the material I have been gathering on Shoreditch and The City. It was a way of bringing some focus to the research I have been doing and offered me a chance to get feedback upon it before the next stage of making it into a more distinct work in its own right.
It is difficult to write about my own tour and make anything like the same sort of critical remarks as I make when reviewing other people's. I will instead just restrict myself to one or two comments. Firstly, I decided to borrow the hat idea from the Occupy Tour team. With me being tall already, wearing a top hat adds and extra bit again onto my height and means I don't need any umbrella to lead people, I am perfectly visible with the hat alone. More than that, it also has echos of Phileas Fogg the Victorian gentleman explorer/navigator of Jules Verne. I find this both amusing and sympathetic as I have just an element of these characteristics myself. The hat therefore gives me license to play up these qualities when so required.
It was a small group that I led, maybe 8 in number. This was a very manageable size and I didn't have to shout or play to the crowd at all. I suspect that to make the tour economically viable I will have to lead larger groups but if I had a choice I'd stick to this smaller number as it made everything more conversational. People felt easy to ask me questions and share their own observations in front of one another, something that larger more anonymous groups generally suppress.
For the pictures I must thank Debbie Kent. She, like some of the others in the group, is also working in a related way on performances that deal with the city. My group was in fact a great mix of artists, curators and friends who managed to entertain one another very effectively as they made their way from point to point.
The tour was quite simple and transparent in the sense that I did not try anything too smart formally but rather performed it as a report on the tours I had taken so far. Giving it in this way left me enough space to be able to perform it in an engaging tone. I should be careful not to lose some of this informality when I next begin the work of integrating the research and layering this tour in a more deliberate way. The comments afterwards in the pub were positive and constructive and I look forward to the Summer when I will complete this tour, start giving it to a broader public and ditch the padded coat.
This is a rather unusual tour, even by the standards of this blog. It is a tour of Broadgate Tower which in itself is nothing particularly special other than that there are no public tours of the tower offered right now. What qualifies it as unique is that I had to assume a completely different identity to my own in order to take this tour.
I arranged a tour of office spaces in order to get a better picture of a private corporate tour, since most of the tours so far covered here have been public one way or another. As the gentrifying march of the City of London, north into Shoreditch, and east into Spitalfields, is one of the key themes to have emerged as a subtext to the many tours I've taken locally, I felt it necessary to get at this story from the inside, as it were, rather than only hearing it from the perspective of the soon to be displaced. I was told I'd find the entrance opposite the giant reindeer, and so it was while in the background is the mouth of Liverpool Street Station, a short walk away.
I arranged an appointment with a company that specialises in renting office space in Broadgate Tower to smaller businesses. I made up a cover story that was inspired by a scene from the James Bond film Skyfall, that was filmed in the building, a scene in which the tower was made over to look like a swanky office block in Shanghai. My cover story was that I was representing a Chinese film producer, a Mr Gao, whose movie was going to be filmed in London next December. This film, Snow Warrior, would require an office for its team to do pre-production work starting in October and they would require more space still, once the full production team arrived for the shoot. Many of the shots were to take place in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, hence the logic of siting their production office here in Broadgate Tower rather than in Soho next to Chinatown, which would seem a more natural choice. With my story prepared I turned up at reception in the company of a friend Elo, who was cast as the photographer. To dress the part I had to wear a suit and tie. The suit was no problem but I was surprised to find that the only tie I had to hand was a bit of a joke tie I acquired recently, a tie decorated with the flags of the European member states. In order to justify the Eurocrat tie, I came up with the story of having to go to a meeting at Europe House immediately after this tour.
The reception desk downstairs asked our business, took our names and issued entry passes. We ascended an escalator into the future then used the passes to open a polished steel security gate and gain access to the lifts. These lifts were unlike any I have previously used for when I saw one open I jumped inside and looked for the button to stop at the twelfth floor in vain. A woman already standing inside politely evicted me, pointing back outside where I found a glass panel in the wall which, when pressed, asked me to select a floor. Pressing twelve, it paused a moment, then indicated I should go to lift C which opened, we stepped inside and were whisked skyward.
After a false start at the wrong reception we found the right one, were greeted with a smile and asked to sit. Refreshments were offered and our contact was called. After a short pause she came around the corner and introduced herself. She took us to an office where we sat and began the tour. This started with questions about what I was looking for and I launched into the Mr Gao story. It seemed to go pretty well and I was relieved I had prepared my story sufficiently in advance so that I could just roll it out with a smile.
The tour of the offices then began. We were shown into some empty offices and also into working offices like this one. There was an absence of clutter, as much of the equipment like photocopiers, binders and water coolers, is shared and located outside.
One after another, I entered the spaces and talked about Mr Gao's requirements. It became easier to maintain this story once it had got a bit of momentum up; it was almost as if I were starting to believe it myself. Given the context, I had to think of The Yes Men and their infiltration of the corporate sector to make activist art. While I am well accustomed to switching between different fronts in daily life, this level of pretence is something else and required some acting skills, quick thinking and complete investment in the mask coupled with a relaxation into the role, inhabiting it as myself and bringing personal qualities like humour and inquisitiveness to it. While it is completely unforgivable and I in no way condone it, I do start to see how it was possible for British police infiltrators to settle into their roles of environmental activists to the point that they formed sexual relationships with the people they were spying on and even fathered children with them. It was Plato who said "the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his face." There is something mildly intoxicating about maintaining a front and the thrill this can provide could, I imagine, blind one to the ethical dimensions of it.
This is the view out a window facing North and East out over Hackney. Running across the centre of the picture is the Overground line with Shoreditch High Street Station the concrete lump in the middle. My tour of tours next year will be covering part of this territory and surveyed from up here it mostly looks like low-level run-down buildings, railway yards and waste grounds begging for redevelopment. The City might imagine itself doing the area a favour by recasting Shoreditch in is own image; where there was once deprivation let there now be tall, shiny offices with a Pret a Manger on the ground floor! A curious marketing hook that was cast my way by my guide was that this was a creative space somehow distinct from the number crunchers down the road in the heart of The City. The basic idea is that the frisson of Shoreditch rubbing against The City produces a different sort of business environment. Evidence used in support of this was that there were recruiters renting offices here. They qualified as creative in this world.
This is the view opposite and to the south. It didn't strike me at the time but it does now that if you had a good vantage point and a very powerful lens you could probably read what was on the desks of these people. Reason enough to draw the blinds.
This is one of the meeting rooms I was shown around. I seem to remember this room was called Battersea, another was named Camden. They all bore the names of respectable London neighbourhoods giving the offices a connection to the wider city they were located in. There were no Leytonstones or Newhams however, this was a city of desirable neighbourhoods only. These rooms came with video conferencing facilities and tea and coffee were provided as part of the package too. They were really quite desirable for what they were. I learned that some of them were leased not only by the hour for meeting but more long-term. There was an independent business school that used two of the larger ones as classrooms into which were packed, predictably enough, a largely Chinese student body learning the finer points of global investment.
We returned to the office and talked over the terms and prices. Unfortunately the computer presentation didn't want to open so I missed out on that but I received it in a file to go over at my leisure. It is not at all what I require but I can imagine the package would be of interest to businesses looking for a foothold in The City. I was struck by the fact that Broadgate Tower advertised itself as a filming location and made it easy for people to film inside of it. Skyfall was not an isolated event but part of consistent stream of media productions that use the building to portray such things as intrigue, Shanghai, chic dining, insider trading and the future.
And here is Elo who got roped into the story as the photographer. This was a good role for her to play as it was close enough to her real life presence that it could be played quite naturally. What's more, it meant that I had my hands free and could concentrate on playing my role with the documentation being both taken care of and explained as part of our story: Mr Gao would want to see pictures of the space. Thank you Elo.
Our tour of Broadgate Tower concluded with us returning our security passes. Here I had to take this picture myself with my phone as taking a picture of the security infrastructure with a camera would draw attention to us for sure. The phone however is a godsend as I could appear to be looking at messages, perhaps finding the address of my next meeting... at Europe House in Westminster.
The Walk The Line Tour is a free audio tour that you can download from London Transport Museum's website. It comes as five separate walks and the one I took is the Shoreditch to Whitechapel walk. The Overground is the name of the line, or more precisely network, that this walk nominally follows and this network is a consolidation of a string of separate tube and rail services that were notoriously unpredictable. I remember one part of it being called the North London Line back in the 90s when it was a joker service that came and went pretty much when it felt like it. It changed hands and became known as The Silverlink Metro for a while, and under new management was only modestly better. There was something about the line that seemed intrinsically slack. This section of the overground, around Shoreditch, a section previously known as the East London Line, was always slightly different from the other tube lines; taking it was like entering into a parallel tube service. When I studied in New Cross I took it often and I remember the train announcements were sometime so informal that it was like being on a mini-bus with friends with the driver chatting and saying hello to everyone as they got on and off. It was smartened up for the Olympics and there is no chat now. There is, however, a community engagement policy and that is how, I suppose, this audio took came about.
Shoreditch High Street Station is where the walk begins. The tour guide is a woman from the Boundary Estate Womens' Group and she tells you about the new station and she seems to be very happy with it saying they have regenerated the neighbourhood. She even expresses her hope that Starbucks can move in.
This is the map that comes with the walk and which you can either download onto your phone or print out and follow off the page. With the title 'Walk The Line' you might imagine that the newly spruced up line might feature as the defining element of the walk, but not a bit of it. As you can see, the walk first visits the The Boundary Estate then heads South down Brick Lane, goes by way of Spitalfields Market and Petticoat Lane Market, before heading along Whitechapel Road to its end point Whitechapel Station. The train line follows a very different route and heads first East above Allen Gardens crosses Valance Road then heads South into Whitechapel. This walk does not follow the line at all, but rather, uses the two stations as its bookends.
Following the map's suggested route I saw a long line of people queuing to get into this building. I tried to guess the purpose of the queue asking myself which celebrity was inside or what sort of audition was taking place but could not tell, so I asked one of the people. It was a discount designer clothing sale, which came as an anticlimax.
Round the corner I passed the local coffee shop, Allpress, which seemed to be doing a steady trade. I can't exactly see why Starbucks would be an improvement upon it, but then again, I'm not so into global tax-dodging brands in general.
I arrived at the first stop on the tour, the Boundary Estate, and I can only guess the tour took me there because the commission for it had fallen on the Boundary Women's Group. This is a way to say the estate was not on the route at all, quite the opposite, and there was conspicuously little to see here. The guide gave a very personal impression of what the area was like from the point of view of a local resident. She neither went deeply into the history of the place, just a few dates was enough, nor into her relationship to the place. In this respect local residents often know very little 'visitor information' about their neighbourhood and their knowledge is often more practical along the lines of where to go to top up your Oyster card without having to wait in a queue. On the other hand, while we all have relationships to the places we live in, transforming these into a tour requires a very specific set of skills that are not always sufficiently appreciated. I don't know the exact process by which this tour was put together, but something was clearly lacking and It may well be as much the fault of London Transport Museum for commissioning this group and not supplying adequate support to help them turn their stories and impressions into a half-decent tour. It could also be a case of me expecting more from a community project than either the community involved in making it or London Transport Museum, who commissioned it, ever did.
Leaving the estate and following the route I next passed Richmix on Bethnal Green Road. This is going to become a central spot on my tour of the area as this is going to be the starting point of The Tour of All Tours which will be presented by Richmix next Summer. Something I noticed that never struck me before, is that they have their own blue plaque beside the door. The Heritage Lottery funding plaque has copied the basic design of the English Heritage blue plaque and then squashed it a little so that it becomes oval shaped. This must constitute the second unofficial blue plaque spotted on these Shoreditch tours so far. More will no doubt reveal themselves. A final thing to mention is that I will be doing something in this venue before next Summer: on 31st January, Chinese New Year's Day, I'll be giving a performance of The Customer Is Always Wrong, in the studio upstairs.
Making my way down Brick Lane I saw two artists at work on a side street. My interest in their work had been awakened from taking a street art tour, so I decided to take a closer look.
On that tour I was told that a significant aspect of street art is the legality of the work. Having heard how a street artist was sentenced to 2 years for defacing a train recently and how 5 years had even been handed out by a Sheffield court, I figured the two young women would not be taking their time to spray so openly if they faced similar treatment. That's why I was interested to take their picture and that's how I got talking to Lee Bofkin who was watching them approvingly. Lee, it turns out, has been instrumental in getting the site owners' approval for a great quantity of the street art in the area to be made legally, and for then promoting the artists' work. Lee said he was not, however, involved in street art tours at all.
A curious omission on the Walk The Line Tour was the old Shoreditch Station, just off Brick Lane. This nondescript brick building that sports some less consensual street art was the end stop on the East London Line. It represents the bad side of the neighbourhood and so was, I am guessing, not included in the Walk The Line Tour, a tour that had practically zero interest in the railway line. The park behind me in this photo is one that I remember hearing a funny, though wholly unverified, story about. The artists Gilbert and George, who live just around the corner, were walking through this park dressed in their identical suits when a gang of skinheads spotted them and shouted, "Oy! Get um!" The two conceptual artists knew the neighbourhood well enough to know this was no idle threat and had to sprint, high-speed, out of the park and back onto Brick Lane to avoid a good kicking. The scene somehow reminds me of the closing sequence of The Benny Hill Show, though through a more violent East London lens.
The walk took me past the many vintage markets and food stalls that thrive in the area and which contribute to the current Camden Town-ification of Brick Lane.
The audio tour stopped somewhat short of the Mosque and talked about it having been a church and synagogue in the past, a line that is repeated in virtually every other tour, no matter what the subject of the tour may be. Even street art tours, like the one I stumbled across here, go over this history.
Next stop was Spitalfields Market. In the Spitalfields Stories Tour I mentioned how it had changed and become more corporate. This was an observation echoed in this tour, however, it was also one welcomed and it was described as a trendy place and one of the best markets in London. What was strange is that the guide went onto say that the things on sale were also very expensive no longer affordable to local residents. It was as if she was celebrating being priced out of her own local market. That's when I started to suspect that she perhaps had an idea of who I the listener was and that she was showing me the most up-market version of the local area that she could, in the belief that that is what I wanted to see. Today the market was hosting a vinyl day for independent record labels. There were a great many stalls selling records and quite a crowd of people milling about.
Then I noticed Doug from The Alternative Tour bouncing up and down to keep warm beside the goat statue, the COSTA charnel house in the background. What's more Doug had a friend who, with beard, leather jacket and cap, also looked the part to give their tour. Later in my tour I did in fact notice Doug's colleague giving their street art tour.
I then made my way to the next point, Petticoat Lane, where I noticed they have put up street maps that are oriented so that the top side of the map points in front of you as you stand facing the map and the bottom of the map indicates what is behind you. I have to say I dislike this sort of map and much prefer those that have North at the top and South at the bottom. I'm guessing that these sort of maps are more easily read by people who have never learnt to read conventional maps as there must be some reason why they are springing up right now; I saw then in Glasgow city centre recently too.
There was a short description of Petticoat Lane Market, again from the point of view of a local shopper, but what was more captivating was the film that being made on the street. It looked like a low-budget film as there was not the usual paraphernalia of the film set, but the director and cameraman were planning their shot carefully and rehearsing the movement of the steady-cam.
Then the street came alive with a bike gang. At first I wondered if this was a flashback to the Critical Mass Tour from a few nights before but no these cyclists were in fact the extras for the scene: a gang of 8 young men on BMXs. They cycled at speed towards the council estate and then charged up the stairs. I was then taken back to the idea of the image of the city being fashioned more through movies than reality and was reminded that the image of the city is not consistent, people in the area sometimes have access to professional quality equipment and also participate in the generation of images too. The identity of the city is multiple and contested, not the sole property of Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes.
The walk then took me on a long stretch with no audio along Whitechapel Road. There are two tours that this dreary trudge brings to mind. First of all, the blue paint on the road indicates CS2 the 'cycle superhighway' upon which four cyclists have been killed so far, with more deaths seemingly inevitable. One indeed was killed at the junction in the background. I wouldn't advise anyone to take a bike tour of CS2 unless they were a TFL executive. This story of the failed transport strategy was very much the subtext of The Critical Mass tour I recently took. The second tour that I had to think of was the Whitechapel Gallery First Thursday's Tour. This is a free bus tour which you apply to by lottery and which takes you to a number of gallery openings in East London on the first Thursday of the month in the company of a curator. I added my name to the lottery and am pleased to say have just been offered a place on the tour this week. Review to follow soon.
And so I finally came to the Starbucks that has been denied Shoreditch. I did not dally.
A little further along Whitechapel Road I saw a Tesco supermarket set back from the main road. This brought to mind something I heard about a coach tour recently. It was a coach tour to Stonehenge and Bath and one of the passengers was a girl who particularly liked shopping at Tesco because, she said, they have good meat and dairy. Apparently, for the whole tour, she kept on commenting, "Oh look a Tesco" when the coach passed one. Not information that the tour guide included in his commentary, but something that the other people taking the tour got anyway.
There was a brief stop by the East London Mosque and a few comments about the Citroen Garage on the side which apparently was the site of a no longer used station. The guide said she herself did not know about this lost station until recently either and this gave me the impression that she had done a little bit of local history research prior to recording to tour so that she had enough to say.
Final stop was Whitechapel Station which she described as a place, "we all know and use." This again thew me as to who this "we" was. Was this a tour by and for local residents, or for whom exactly? I couldn't exactly say. Anyway, Whitechapel station and market was its usual unruly self and this brought to mind the Olympic Marathon route change that I mentioned on a previous blog. Despite official assertions that the reason the race would bypass East London was not because the area is poor and would give a negative impression of London to the global audience, it is hard to see the snub in any other way. The marathon is, after all, a tour of the city that presents it in a very specific way through the interaction of sport and architecture.
Thankfully POPLAR TV was at hand to cover the 2012 race in the satirical McMarathon report.
