After visiting Brick Lane during our scavenger hunt at the very beginning of the semester, I decided the East End was somewhere I wanted to visit in daylight and definitely not by myself. The environment is extremely diverse and can be a bit intimidating if you don't know where you're going. As a major Bengali community, it was notable that most of the street and shop signs were written in both English and Bengali.
Though my first impression wasn't completely accurate, I'm still glad that I chose to go at the time we did! We ran into a drunken homeless man who was yelling at us as we passed him and followed us for a bit while we power-walked away from him... weird. A lot of the shop owners also stand outside of their stores and tried to talk to us as we walked by. The first part of the walk was much prettier than I expected it to be after having seen Brick Lane. A lot of the Georgian houses were refurbished and turned into shops on the ground floors, while the tops were left as flats. We were told the houses were built in the 18th century, which shows just how long the area has been around.
As we continued our walk, we ran into Commercial Street where Spitalfield Market is, but we unfortunately chose to go on a Saturday when the shops weren't open. We did end up walking past a few more hidden vintage markets that we explored a little bit. They definitely had their own feel to them, with most of the merchandise being second-hand and mostly outdated. Mallory and I found a stand that was entirely jorts (long jean shorts) and couldn't help but take a picture of it!!
There was also a street that had a row of tiny shops that were very commercial brands, but discretely adorned on the outside. They were all little cubes that were exactly the same size and had their own merchandise on the inside, but you could easily walk past them if you weren't paying attention. Along this street and a few others, we found a bunch of graffiti that was pretty amazing. We've recently developed an interest in Bansky's art throughout London, so it was cool to see knock-offs of his work along with a variety of other art along different buildings.
Our last stop was the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It was extremely small in comparison to a lot of the museums we've visited for our art class, and housed mostly contemporary art. There was a room with only projector screens and mirrors in it that were placed symmetrically to mirror the images from the projectors. There was another room on the upper level with videos of two men dressed in black that created "Human Art" which was absolutely hilarious. One man would manipulate something in a white room that would cause the other man to move in a certain way so that they would both end up supporting the other and stay in that stance. There was one part where the man kicks out the leg of a coffee table that the second man is standing on, and he slides forward towards the first man, where he is caught. It's the little things in life....
Overall, the visit both reinforced and challenged my first ideas of the area. I'm glad that we got to look into it a bit more and see all the parts that the East End has to offer in a somewhat neglected area of London!
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