Brick Lane is in the East End of London. Thanks to Monica Ali’s 2003 novel of the same name and the 2007 film version, many people think of it as “Banglatown”, the home of the Bangladeshi community, but that is only part of the story. Before that it was the home of Jewish immigrants escaping persecution in Eastern Europe, and before that it was the home of Huguenots escaping persecution in France. One person who is fascinated by Brick Lane’s history is Rachel Lichtenstein, an artist and writer whose grandparents moved to Brick Lane from Eastern Europe. Like many Jewish families, they later left London and moved to Southend-on-Sea, where Rachel Lichtenstein was born but, as a young woman in the 1990s, she decided to go back to Brick Lane. She taught art in local schools. She also interviewed a large number of local residents for a book called On Brick Lane:
Rachel Lichtenstein (standard British accent): Most of the primary school pupils at that time were Bengali. Some of them had been born in the UK, some had been born in Bangladesh, and not all of them were English speakers. Their stories fascinated me, the stories of their parents fascinated me because they were very similar to the story of my father to an extent, you know, they were first or second generation migrants coming from very religious communities, trying to find their footing in this new place, a kind of in between an old world and the new, and then the more I learnt about the history, I became really fascinated with places like the mosque, on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, which before it was a mosque was the great Machzike Hadath Synagogue, and before it was a synagogue was a Huguenot chapel. So there were buildings that seemed to reflect, literally tell the story of all these different waves of migrants who’d kind of settled in that particular area of the East End of London, and made it their home, and Brick Lane seemed to particularly be the place that kind of told these stories, it was so multilayered.
THE LATEST INVASION
On Brick Lane was first published in 2007 and since then the area has undergone another transformation. The new immigrants are called “hipsters”, young white Britons with a lot of money. Many locals resent this gentrification process and things reached a head last September when protesters attacked the Cereal Killer Café, which is considered a symbol of the gentrification process:
Rachel Lichtenstein: The reality of Brick Lane is that you’ve Council flats now changing hands for half a million pounds, and then you’ve got no more social housing being developed, and you’ve got a huge amount of familes and migrant families and East End families, you know, who want to stay in the area and they can’t afford to. So it’s the opposite of my grandparents, who couldn’t wait to get out! You know, there’s now a lot of Bangladeshi families, the next generation, who’d like to stay in the area because, you know, they’ve got their mosque here, they’ve got their Halal food, their family lives here, the community’s here, but they can’t afford to live here, so there is resentment, but, you know, as the City encroaches ever further eastward, it does seem to be inevitability. You know, Brick Lane, this area here, Petticoat Lane, will never again be the place where the poor and the dispossessed and new migrants to the area settle, ‘cause they wouldn’t be able to afford to live here.
CONSTANT EVOLUTION
Many local artists have also been forced out, but Rachel Lichtenstein believes that Brick Lane hasn’t lost all of its character:
Rachel Lichtenstein: There’s still a vibrancy to the area. I just kind of have this theory about places that have been intensely lived in over time, you know, they just retain some trace of all those stories that have happened in a place, and there’s a great richness to an area like this because of that, and it’s constantly reinventing itself. It’s not just now. I’ve been a tour guide of this area for a long time, and 25 years ago I’d take elderly Jewish people around and they’d be talking like I am now, you know, they don’t recognize the place that they knew when they were younger ‘cause it’s completely changed and they were kind of horrified by it, and it will be the same with those young Bangladeshi kids that I taught 20 years ago. You know, if you walk around with them, it would be different and, again, and this is London and this is cities and they constantly become something else whilst retaining a bit of that kind of texture and flavour of the past.