Queen Mary University's East End Tour

Today's tour was a little fractured beginning and ending with other tours... maybe it can be called a sandwich tour. The filling, however, is in no doubt, that was an audio tour provided by Queen Mary University of London.  

The sandwich metaphor can be stretched just a little further as I began my evening in search of the Charnel House in Spitalfields which I had been made aware of on a different tour and marked on the map as occupying the same spot as Costa. Today I found it and to my surprise it is not right to call it the Costa Charnel House, it is much more the Pret a Manger Charnel House, as you can see in the picture. There do seem to be an inordinate number of these sandwich stores in the city.

The Queen Mary University East End Tour began round the corner at Liverpool Street Station. There is something very appealing about starting tours at stations as they are portals full of potential and generally not observed closely enough since people are usually in a hurry coming and going. To encourage this transitory nature, there are, apparently, sonic devices called MOSQUITOS that emit a sound that is particularly annoying to people under 25. These devices are used (by people over 25 we can safely assume) to discourage gangs from congregating and Liverpool Street Station is meant to be one of the stations that has this ultra-sonic sound played as a constant. I was unable to hear it and so simply put on my earphones and started the audio recording. The Queen Mary Tour told me to exit via the Broadgate escalator and in this respect  treated the station much like everybody else: a non-place that leads you elsewhere.

The instructions were at first quite clear and spoken by a woman who articulated very thoroughly. She told me to go down this lane, which I did, and that is where the tour got going with some descriptions of the narrow passage. The narrator acted as the host and from time to time introduced lecturers from Queen Mary who would speak on their specialist topics. Here for example there was, if I remember correctly, a professor talking about how the East End was viewed as being a terrible place full of crime and social problems. The fact that the experts were from different departments of Queen Mary made it clear to me that this tour was an inter-disciplinary initiative bringing together the likes of the English department with the Geography department. This was interesting in that it demonstrated how geographically framed tours (e.g. an East End Tour) by their nature tend to dip into different subjects; a bit of history, a bit of politics, a bit of geography and, why not, a bit of literature. Still, there was an assumption about what it was interesting to talk about and this mostly meant talking about the past. A tour that mixed two disciplines and did not take such a historical frame would be far more curious indeed. You could mix, for example, crime and botany and while you'd have two rather separate streams of information you'd probably find some points where they informed one another.

The tour took me to many familiar spots, such as Petticoat Lane Market. I'm not going to refer back to the audio so I can be clear about what was said, I think it is better to rely on memory so that what I write here is what is remembered, the impressions the tour left me with. Here then, I think I was told that this was one of London's oldest markets. I seem to remember they added some market sound effects too: audio doubling.

I passed Happy Days fish and chip shop which is one of the Jack the Ripper sites and I remember Barnaby, the guide on Ripping Yarns Tour, saying they do really good fish and chips. He was absolutely right. With a bag of chips in hand, I continued my tour.

Once again I got the immigrant story of the area and it was the Jewish Soup Kitchen that was the site for the telling of the story this time round. The tone was quite high and modestly academic with quotes from period sources and considered commentary. The story was, however, identical to that told on regular tourist tours.

Because this tour was going over well trodden ground, I interested myself by looking at the sites obliquely, such as at this 'designated locked site' on the side of Christ Church. I listened obediently to the story then to the instructions telling me where the next listening point was and then stopped the recording and made my way there. This form of engagement with the tour was less intense than a guided tour during which you are still more part of a tour during those marches between locations and it was certainly much less intensive than the immersive Sound Map Tour which surrounds you from start to finish.

True to form the tour took in the Brick Lane Mosque and there I heard about its history, as I had on almost every other tour that comes this way. It might be necessary to map the points that appear on multiple tours and those that only feature on a single tour. A specialist tour of tours would try to connect the single use points whereas a generalist tour of tours would select only points that feature on at least two or three tours. What is nice to observe are points that feature in multiple tours and which are talked about in completely different ways, like SO Gallery on Brick Lane which combines Jewish heritage and contemporary art.

The tour took me to the park where there was a story about discrimination against  Bangladeshis in the 70s. The story finished in a curious way. The narrator said, "if you want to end your tour now, go to Aldgate East Tube station over the road." She didn't go so far as to say, "you'd be a mug to continue" but there was something of a sense of "you've seen the best of it" in her tone of voice. Taking this a step further I imagine a tour in which you are repeatedly invited to finish it at one point after another and in a variety of ways. 

There next followed a long walk from the park to Whitechapel during which there were no recordings. This is more or less that same problem that the Walk The Line Tour faced: this stretch of road is not obviously interesting. I therefore had to think of the young lady on the Chinese tour bus I previously mentioned who pointed out a TESCO whenever she passed one. Since there is this one on the route, I do so in memory of her. I was starting to think I should have taken the narrator's advice and quit while I was ahead.

 

I also noticed several stores with signs like this: 

Money Transfer | Job Centre | Travels & Tours | Hajj & Umrah 

This got me thinking about pilgrimage and hajj as a tour. It's a huge topic that I'll have to return to at some point, hopefully in the context of a pilgrimage site or tour. Briefly though, I remember visiting Lourdes in Southern France and being surprised at how this Catholic pilgrimage destination managed to be simultaneously kitsch and impressive. I also remember hearing about virtual Hajj that was a big story a while back. When Second Life was in its prime you could send your avatar on pilgrimage to Mecca and I seem to remember other forms of virtual pilgrimage too. More research that needs to be done!

I downloaded the MP3 audio files and PDF map onto my phone but I found that my phone would not open the map file. This meant I was reliant on the audio instructions to find my way. By about two thirds of the way through, the audio instructions started becoming vague and I had to start guessing and looking around to make sure I was on the right path. As there was no street sign to indicate Mile End Road, for example, I had to scan the business plates till I found this one confirming I was on the right road.

The tour took me to progressively less and less glamorous locations such as this slither of green space that used to be important for meetings and public speaking. It is hard to imagine that happening now. You'd have to shout over the buses that roar past and the relentless flow of Mile End Road.  

The nadir moment of the tour for me came when I realised I must have completely missed one of the audio stops. I could not see anything like the place I was looking for and so I just pressed PLAY and listened to the next track hoping I could get a clearer picture of the place from the recording. I found myself listening to a discourse on geometry and social values while looking into Topps Tiles. At this point I realised I might as well make what I will of the tour and find my own sense in it. This was actually quite a liberating moment as I stopped feeling like I was making a mistake but instead allowed it all to be experience that could be interpreted however I wished.

Cut adrift then, I came to SFC (Stepney Fried Chicken) nestled alongside Stepney Green tube station. While I might smile at the woman who maps the country with TESCO I must admit I have my own version of this with the fried chicken outlets that proliferate in London. I used to take pictures of their signs and after some months had quite a collection. There is a nice transference of signifiers in these as they are basically copying KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) which in turn is probably a copy of something else, and substituting Kentucky with another location, usually plucked from the American South. Some however are resolutely local like SFC and then there are the PFCs (Perfect Fried Chicken) which in turn have their imitators who copy the PFC logo but insist they are Philadelphia Fried Chicken. Where the copy of the copy will go next is anyone's guess...

Making my way back to Liverpool Street I passed the locations I missed towards the end of the Queen Mary Tour and saw how I managed to miss them. I have to admit it did not feel like any great loss as I listened to the information anyway, none of which was of a nature that depended on being there. When I arrived back in The City I came across another tour of sorts, I was barged aside by a trail of Santa Claus clad joggers. I passed them twice in fact and their distinctive costumes made them stand out in the street. Earlier in the day I had read about a City of London run and now I was amidst another group making their high speed tour of The City. It is debatable to what degree a race like this is really a tour but for me it is enough that they make this formalised circuit of the City as a group. 

I wondered what the route of their tour was and where they would finish and I guessed it must be nearby as some of them looked like they were at breaking point. I opted for Spitalfields Market, made my way there and sure enough I found a large number of city workers in Santa outfits eating mince pies and drinking mulled wine. I also saw them being timed and something of the charity operation they were doing this for. So the way this 5K race works is that the runners represent their companies and both the individual winners and fastest company teams are awarded a prize, symbolic I suppose, on a small podium. While I have a general sympathy for people doing daft things in public the Santa outfit has become a bit overused in my opinion; I saw a similar gathering of jogging Santas last year in Portsmouth, I've seen Santa dressed pub crawls and the goodwill that the costume typically invokes has also been used by Fathers For Justice who have campaigned in Santa outfits on several occasions. Maybe what I mean by this is simply that it has become ever so slightly ordinary.

The First Thursday Tour: Whitechapel Gallery's free bus tour of exhibition openings

The First Thursday Bus is a free bus tour that you can take on, unsurprisingly enough, the first Thursday of the month. It has been running a while now and it is part of the much broader First Thursday initiative by which East London galleries stay open late and often hold not so very private views the same evening. The bus tour departs from Whitechapel Gallery and takes you to a selection of participating galleries.  

I was instructed to arrive at 6.45 in order to pick up my ticket. Upon arrival I found the front desk besieged with hipsters as there was another event taking place in the gallery that evening and people were picking up tickets. The staff were ticking off names, answering the phone, handing out different coloured stickers for the various events and answering the inevitable random questions. There was also a 'meet-up group' trying to form amongst those standing around but nobody seemed to know who was and was not part of that group so it  was slow to happen and more than a little self-conscious. Next to this there were book stalls and some people selling raffle tickets for a youth project. It was proper London art bustle.

The tickets for the tour were not all collected so someone from the gallery went around checking to see who was on the waiting list, handing out yellow stickers accordingly. Because it is free to enter into the ticket lottery to go on the tour (you apply a few days in advance) there must routinely be quite a number of people who do not collect their tickets. If you really want to do this tour then, it is probably quite possible to get on it simply by arriving in advance at around 6.30 and adding your name to the waiting list. Nothing beats actually being there.

I don't how it happened but the map of the tour on the official website is wrong. As well as having no number 1, Gallery SO is actually located on Brick Lane and not north of Bethnal Green as shown above. The rules dictating the shape of the tour, as far as I understand them, are 1) it starts at 7PM 2) visits 3 galleries in the East End and 3) returns to Aldgate East at around 9PM or shortly after. This time frame is set so that it works with the timing of the private views most of which are winding down by 9. It is interesting to note that there is another First Thursday tour also available from the gallery and that one is a walking tour which obviously covers a shorter distance. Common to both are these bold red lines which connect one gallery to the next like a teleporter zapping you from opening to opening. For those pounding the pavements they must therefore decide for themselves how to make their way from one point to the next as the precise walking route is not specified. Some roads might present themselves as the obvious path but there is an element of active choice here as it is not always obvious. While at first I thought this an oversight I now see potential in deliberate ambiguity and will have to file this thought away in order to retrieve it at a later point when I need to direct people somewhere but not direct them too precisely.  

The bus was waiting for us outside the gallery. It was a nice comfortable Mercedes.

The 20-odd seat bus filled slowly and there were quite a number of empty seats. It was perhaps a little over half full and I had the whole back row to myself. We left Whitechapel 10 minutes behind schedule, probably the result of the ticketing being so complicated and hoping a few latecomers would arrive to bolster numbers.

First stop was SO Gallery which I was excited to enter because it had already featured in the Sound Map Tour I had taken barely a week before. This overlapping of spaces is what happens when working with several tours that cross a more restricted geographical space. It invited me to speculate whether there was a connection between the Jewish heritage referenced in the previous tour and the art of the current one. 

After the gallery's curator said a few words we then got an introduction to the exhibition from Leo Fitzmaurice, the artist whose work filled the space for his solo show Post Match. He talked about his inspiration and process but generally avoided trying to define the meaning of the work too firmly. The exhibition comprised of the tops of cigarette packets that had been unfolded and modified in order to look like footballer's tops. It was a simple idea that was well realised and which allowed for many connections to be made between the worlds of smoking and football. To me at least, it invited a semiotic reading of these two fields that had been unified in the artwork, and the subsequent rubbing of tangential orders of symbols (eg. the Bundesliga vrs cigarette brand design) against one another to produce new meanings. Thinking about this further the CH N KATZ. sign above the window is not so different, or at the very least, has the potential to create a similar crossover of symbols.

When I stepped out of the gallery I saw someone I know, Hydar Dewachi, being dragged into a disagreement with a man on the street. It seemed to be about the right to take photographs and the man on the left appeared to be angry and looking for someone to shout at. I was about to jump in and come to Hydar's defence but the tour bus was waiting for me (I was last person to leave the gallery) and my intervention would probably have only escalated the tension. I later heard that thankfully things resolved themselves OK. It was for me a moment that popped me out of the First Thursday Tour and into a very different situation. I guess most conventional tours function like worlds unto themselves and such events do not happen though I did notice that on the Winterthur Tour people taking it bumped into friends of theirs who happened to be passing in the street, so this is not unprecedented. 

Developing this idea, it amuses me to imagine tours that encourage this fluidity more, either by deliberately going to places connected to the individuals on the tour or going to public meeting spots where such things happen as a matter of course. This First Thursday Tour did already have something of that quality as First Thursdays is, for people connected to the London art world, a significant monthly socialising event. I did in fact bump into another person I knew while waiting at Whitechapel Gallery and met him again later in the evening on the street outside. This happened because I  was in a context I have a place within. As for general public meeting spaces, those are few in number in London as the city is large and anonymous. In smaller cities these function better, such as the pedestrianised cafe zone in the centre of Zagreb. Even there though, it is not a hub for everyone but it does function far more effectively as a random meeting zone to the extent that if you are in a hurry it is a place best avoided. 

Dave Roberts, of Dave Roberts Foundation was our tour guide. He gave a brief introduction at the start of the trip and said a few words about each space, like he is doing here, before we arrived at them and the coach emptied. The coach was in fact very well equipped for guided tours, there was even a microphone just to his right that he could have used in order to look and sound like a proper tour guide. He was never going to go there however.

Beach, the next gallery we stopped at, was smaller and much more crowded. They were showing the work of an artist usually associated with street art who had recently moved into making ceramic 3D works. There was also another event taking place simultaneously in the gallery and a woman was handing out bottle after bottle at the entrance. I was less excited about the work, indeed there was less of it on display, this place was more about meeting people and taking advantage of the drinks. On leaving I took one for the bus ride.

By the time we were back on the bus and moving agin we were running late and our last stop was still a little bit of a drive away and the traffic was inching along Brick Lane. By this time a few people had dropped out of the tour and a new couple had joined us as there was plenty of space. There was in general a more informal atmosphere on the bus with the drinks flowing and people chatting to one another who an hour and a half ago had been strangers. Drawing close to our destination Chisenhale Gallery, we were given another short introduction as to the sort of gallery it is, namely a publicly funded space that typically offers rising artists their first major solo show in London. 

We entered and were immediately asked to take our shoes off before proceeding any further. I have heard of performances at which the audience is required to be fully nude, fortunately this was a more modest request but one which changed our relationship to the space nonetheless.

We entered the gallery proper and sat on the carpeted floor in front of the screen and watched the video. Unlike the other galleries there were no drinks and there was no scene, in fact we were the only people in the gallery. We watched a video work of Jordan Wolfson that was a mix of animation and exterior shots mostly taken around SoHo in the artist's native NYC. The work was OK and reminded me of when I briefly worked for a SoHo gallery in the 90s but I found myself drifting off and asking myself how this piece of work ended up in front of me. I came to the conclusion that this is a two part question the first part of which is how I ended up on the First Thursday Tour: how the tour came into existence and how Chisenhale Gallery ended up on this tour. The other side of the question is how did this video end up being shown in this gallery and that is also a rather complicated issue, particularly as this was not the work's first showing and Chisenhale usually commissions. Both these questions are basically questions about the mechanics of the London (and global) art world where private and public money mix and different interests are served. A woman from the gallery talked a little about the work and why it was here when we were back outside but I felt there was a lot more to this encounter that was left unsaid. To really get inside of a seemingly simple question such as "how did I end up looking at this?" could easily be a PhD study in itself so I will not go any further here as I've probably already said enough.  

The evening ended when the bus dropped us off at Aldgate East a three-minute walk from Whitechapel Gallery. My over-riding impression of it is this is the sort of tour that does not feed you that much information but instead is rather open-ended and you can make of it what you like, depending on what you bring to it in the first place. Someone who hates art and thinks it pretentious will most likely come away thinking it was evening spent amongst tossers while someone interested in contemporary art and the edgy fashion of the London art scene will be right in their element and return bringing their friends next time round.

The Walk The Line Tour

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.