London (Fodor's 2012) - Fodor's [51]
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Getting Oriented | East End Street Smarts | East End Art Scene | Top Attractions | Worth Noting
Updated by Mish Rosenberg
Made famous by Dickens and infamous by Jack the Ripper, the East End is one of London’s most enduringly evocative neighborhoods. It may have fewer conventional tourist attractions but it’s rich in folk history, architectural gems, and feisty burgeoning culture. Once home to French Huguenots, then Ashkenazi Jews, the area now has a large Bangladeshi community. Since the early 1990s the area has also attracted students and hipsters in the art and fashion fields, all lured by the grand old industrial spaces.
Nowadays the East End is London’s most culturally diverse area. East of Whitechapel Road are the famous Whitechapel Art Gallery; the Whitechapel Bell Foundry; and Brick Lane, the heart of the Bangladeshi East End, filled with innumerable curry houses and glittering sari shops, and also home to the Old Truman Brewery, now converted to studios and gallery space. The Sunday morning junk market on Brick Lane adds further complements to the rewarding vintage-clothes shopping in this area.
Since the East End was heavily bombed in World War II, and subsequently rebuilt with public housing estates, it’s not the best-looking part of the capital, although pockets of historic buildings do remain. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s masterpiece, Christ Church, Spitalfields soars above Fournier Street, alongside some fine early Georgian houses. For a sensory experience of Georgian life, visit Dennis Severs’s House. Kids enjoy Spitalfields City Farm and, to the east in Bethnal Green, the quirky V&A Museum of Childhood. Farther east still, toward Mile End, are the former Trinity Almshouses, with the statue of William Booth on the very spot where the first Salvation Army meetings were held, and the notorious Blind Beggar pub. The immense Royal London Hospital and its museum are just a few yards away.
Today Spitalfields and Shoreditch are London’s most exciting bohemian neighborhoods, together with Hoxton, just north of here. There are stylish boutiques (especially on Cheshire Street) and cafés, artists’ studios, and galleries in the plentiful old, derelict industrial spaces that were bought up cheaply and have been imaginatively remodeled. Spitalfields Market, with its arts and crafts and design booths, is open daily, but weekends are the liveliest. In Shoreditch, Columbia Road on Sunday (8–2) gets buried under forests of shrubs and blooms of all shapes and sizes during London’s main plant and flower market. The Geffrye Museum occupies a row of early-18th-century almshouses, and that bastion of contemporary art, the East End branch of the White Cube gallery, lies to the west in the very hip Hoxton Square.
GETTING ORIENTED
TOP REASONS TO GO
The Jack the Ripper Walk: Track the very footsteps of the world’s most infamous serial killer through the Victorian slum streets he once called his own—unforgettable.
Geffrye Museum: This magical collection of period rooms—rich in antiques, brocades, and crystal—offers a peek into the lives of extraordinary Londoners through the years.
Fast Forward to the 1880s: Take a “candlelight” tour of a gorgeous Georgian town house, stage-set to replicate the life of a 19th-century grandee at Dennis Severs’ House.
Skip the Light Fantastic: Have a hedonistic night out bar- and club-crawling in Hoxton and Shoreditch.
The Coolest, Hottest Art Scene: The East End isn’t picturesque, but the art scene here is vibrant, colorful, and exciting—small galleries are interspersed with larger collections.
MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR TIME
To experience the East End at its most lively, make sure you visit on the weekend—here it’s possible to shop, eat, drink, and party your way through a whole 72 hours. Spitalfields Market bustles all weekend, whereas Brick Lane is at its best on a Sunday morning—also the time to visit Columbia Road for its glorious