Brick Lane on a Sunday: Beigels, Vinyl, Vintage and the Best Street Art in London

Brick Lane on a Sunday morning in February is cold, loud, faintly smelling of frying onions at half past ten, and completely covered in paint. Somebody is selling a filing cabinet, four amplifiers and a mannequin in a wedding dress off the pavement. Somebody else is flicking through a crate of records on a road that has had a market on it, in one form or another, since the seventeenth century.

I go back every few months and it is never the same street twice, because the walls get repainted constantly. Here is how to do Brick Lane properly: what to see, when to go, and which of the things everybody tells you to do are actually worth it.

Four Hundred Years of Other People's Arrivals

The name is not poetic. It was Whitechapel Lane, and it became Brick Lane because of the brick and tile works that dug the local brick earth from the fifteenth century onwards. Everything since has been layered on top of that.

In the seventeenth century French Huguenot weavers, fleeing persecution, settled here and in Spitalfields next door, and the tall houses with their wide attic windows, built to let light onto a loom, are still standing all round Fournier Street. In the nineteenth century Irish and then Ashkenazi Jewish families arrived, and the Sunday market grew out of a dispensation that let Jewish traders sell on a Sunday.

From the middle of the twentieth century Bengali families, most of them Sylheti, made it the centre of Bangladeshi London. The area was branded Banglatown in 1997 and the ward itself was renamed Spitalfields and Banglatown in 2002.

The single best illustration of all this stands at the corner of Fournier Street.

The building went up in 1742 as a Huguenot chapel, became a Methodist chapel in 1819, a synagogue in 1898, and since 1976 has been the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid. One building, four congregations, three faiths, same walls. There is a sundial high on the side with the motto Umbra Sumus, we are shadows, which was put there by the Huguenots and has outlasted all of them.

The Street Art, and How to Find the Good Stuff

Brick Lane and the streets running off it are the densest concentration of street art in London, and because the walls are repainted so often, half of what you photograph will be gone in six months. That is the point rather than a problem.

The single most famous piece is on a shutter about halfway up: David Bowie, in full Aladdin Sane lightning bolt, eating a beigel, painted by Benzi Brofman on the front of the beigel shop, with London's first and best beigel shop lettered across the wall beside it in turquoise. It is only visible when the shutter is down, which on a shop that trades at all hours means early morning is your window.

The other one everybody comes for is the enormous crane by the Belgian artist ROA on a gable end just off Brick Lane on Hanbury Street. It is black and white, several storeys high, entirely still, and it has survived since 2010 in a place where nothing survives, because even the other painters leave it alone.

Beyond those two, just walk. Hanbury Street, Fashion Street, Sclater Street, Grimsby Street under the railway, Redchurch Street and the whole of the Truman Brewery yard. Look for the big paste-ups of faces in pink and yellow on corner buildings, the tags layered six deep on shutters, and the tiny pieces at knee height that nobody notices. Banksy, Stik, D*Face, Ben Eine and Omar Hassan have all worked here at various points.

The Markets, and Which Day to Come

Sunday is the day. The street market runs along Brick Lane and spills into Cheshire Street and Sclater Street, and it is genuinely two markets wearing the same name: a scruffy, wonderful car boot of tools, bikes, phone chargers and furniture at the northern end, and a curated vintage and food operation in the covered halls of the Old Truman Brewery further south.

The Truman Brewery halls are the reliable ones. The Sunday UpMarket, the Backyard Market and the Vintage Market between them cover independent designers, records, secondhand clothes and about forty food stalls, and they run whatever the weather, which matters in February.

Outside, the best stalls are the ones that look least organised: a trestle under a white gazebo hung with vintage military jackets, a table of hats and leather gloves, a rack of band t shirts. Bring cash for these, because half the traders still prefer it, and haggle gently rather than hard.

On Saturdays the street is quieter and the shops are all open, which some people prefer. On a weekday it is a normal, slightly frayed East End road with very good curry houses on it, and you will have the murals to yourself.

Beigels, Curry and What to Actually Eat

At the north end of Brick Lane there are two beigel shops almost next door to each other, one with a white front and one with a yellow, and Londoners have opinions about which is better that they will not be talked out of. Both sell the same essential thing: a dense, chewy, boiled beigel with salt beef and a smear of fierce English mustard, or smoked salmon and cream cheese, for a price that has barely moved in a decade.

One of them is open around the clock, which is why you will find people eating salt beef at four in the morning in evening dress.

The curry houses in the middle stretch are the other institution, and the trick is to ignore whoever is standing outside offering you a discount and a free drink. Go on recommendation or go by how full the room is. The Bangladeshi restaurants here have been feeding this street for fifty years, and the good ones do not need to shout.

Beyond that: coffee and books at the Brick Lane Bookshop at number 166, which is small, extremely well chosen and has been there since the 1970s; salt beef, pastries and street food in the Truman yard; and Rough Trade East, the record shop in the brewery, which has a cafe, a stage and a marquee out front announcing whoever is playing in-store that week.

The Shops Worth Going Into

Vintage is the reason a lot of people come, and the offer runs from properly curated to gloriously chaotic. Big warehouse shops are selling by the kilo, small dealers with rails of leather and suede, and at least one place whose entire pavement frontage is a heap of lamps, chairs, ironing boards and mannequins under a hand-painted sign reading Luxury Junk, which is the most honest shop name in London.

My favourite is the props and signage place, a room stacked to the ceiling with theatre letters, on-air signs, peep show arrows, a red heart with wings, mirrors, hats and handbags, where nothing is priced, and everything is for sale. You will not need any of it. You will want most of it.

If rummaging is your thing generally, the Classic Car Boot Sale at King's Cross is the other London vintage day I would clear a weekend for.

A Suggested Route

Start at the north end, at the beigel shops, at about half past nine when the shutters are still coming up, and the Bowie is visible. Eat a beigel standing on the pavement, because that is how it is done.

Walk south down Brick Lane through the car boot end, detour left into Cheshire Street for the dealers, and come back. Duck right into Hanbury Street for the ROA crane. Carry on to the Old Truman Brewery, go through the arch and do the covered markets, then Rough Trade.

Come out at the south end past the mosque, turn right into Fournier Street for the Huguenot houses, which are the most beautiful street of early Georgian terraces in London and are almost always empty of people, and finish at Spitalfields Market for lunch. Two and a half hours, and you will have seen four centuries.

Visiting Brick Lane: Practical Notes

Where it is: Brick Lane, London E1 and E2, running north from Whitechapel High Street through Spitalfields and across Bethnal Green Road up to Swanfield Street.

Getting there: Shoreditch High Street on the Overground is the closest at about five minutes, Aldgate East is about eight, and Liverpool Street is a ten minute walk from the south end. Do not drive.

When: Sunday from around ten to five for the full market. Saturday for the shops with a quieter street. Any weekday morning if you are only here for the street art and want clean photographs.

Cost: free to walk, and as cheap or expensive as you make it. A beigel is a couple of pounds. Bring cash for the outdoor stalls.

What to know: it is busy, it is crowded on Sundays to the point of shuffling, and the crowd makes it good pickpocketing ground, so keep your bag in front of you. Ignore the restaurant touts. And if you are photographing traders or their stalls, ask first; almost everyone says yes, and it makes the whole thing more pleasant.

Nearby: Spitalfields Market, Columbia Road flower market on a Sunday morning ten minutes north, the Whitechapel Gallery to the south, and the City a fifteen-minute walk away with the rooftop terrace at 25 Cannon Street for a free view. For more London walking, there is a New Year's Day walk in Notting Hill and a freezing bright morning in Warren Mews.

Brick Lane is not a beautiful street, and it has never pretended to be. It is a four hundred year old argument between everybody who has ever arrived in London, conducted in brick, spray paint, salt beef and secondhand furniture, and there is nowhere else quite like it.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.