bricklane

in the midst of my research prior to our trip on timeout london i discovered a list of london's best markets & was struck to find that the one marketplace i had never heard of was the number one place for vintage, evidenced by the comments on the article. i was not aware that among dozens of vintage vendors @ bricklane we would also find every single hip, trendy, artsy youth (18-32 years) in london.


photo note: snapped by kelsey, outside of the baker street tube stop, this is the only photo we have from our bricklane day: french hat + latte + oyster card = too much european

it was strange to walk down streets that looked more like they belonged in new york than london - sort of sketchy & definitely not charming - & rather intimidating to look like lost tourists in an area clearly unbeknownst to & off limits to tourism. it was more than obvious that we were in the right place once we stumbled into a central area of shops & pubs, though. hundreds of scene & hip looking people. any one of them could have walked up to me & told me he or she was a starving artist, an undiscovered guitarist, &/or a drug-addicted college student studying philosophy & letting life lead them & i would have believed him or her. in retrospect, it should not have been surprising. the bricklane area identifies itself as "extremely popular with London’s edgy and artistic crowd, featuring galleries, restaurants, markets and festivals throughout the year".
it also should have been significantly less surprising to step onto a self-sufficient planet, its orbit powered by everyone culturally-aware & everything cultural, seeing as we visited bricklane on a sunday for the sunday up market. apparently we are inherently in touch with this hip scene ("the best day to visit Brick Lane market is on Sundays").
aside from feeling like i had just entered the 2010 version of the punk-infused london of 1977, i also felt really welcome (& cool) @ bricklane. everyone is "into" one another there. even though the marketplace's population is most synonymous with the artsy new yorkers i spend more time making fun of than complimenting, there was something far more friendly & far less standoffish about the bricklane inhabitants than the new yorkers that go to comparable flea markets. i suppose this means one thing: even the edgiest londoners are more amicable than the trendy new yorkers that are might even be an object of admiration in the eyes of many of these friendly london lipstick-stained, grunge-wearing, doc marten-loving, mohawk-styling hipsters. this is a sad commentary on new york, but i am probably biased. of course, i also have no real authority on this matter (as any hip new yorker would point out). i guess it's a question of feeling welcome by the people who are supposedly the most liberal, most intellectual, & most interesting, be it in either of these great cities.

endnote: can't say a lot of these things any better myself