Three in the morning, a queue out the door, and a genuine argument breaking out over whether salt beef counts as a legitimate breakfast food. Just an ordinary night on the Lane.
I went down to Brick Lane at three in the morning this week, purely for research purposes, and found the bagel shop queue stretching considerably further down the pavement than the actual shop itself, a genuinely reliable nightly phenomenon that has, at this point, become as fundamentally part of Shoreditch’s identity as anything the more official tourist guides tend to mention.
The crowd at that hour is a genuinely fascinating cross-section, club-goers still processing the night, cab drivers grabbing a quick bite between fares, and a small but committed population of people who, as far as I can tell, simply prefer their bagels at three in the morning on principle, queue length notwithstanding.
I witnessed a genuinely heated, entirely good-natured debate break out about whether salt beef constitutes a legitimate breakfast food or whether the whole exercise only counts as a late continuation of the previous night, a distinction that mattered enormously to at least four separate people standing near me and approximately nobody else within earshot.
What strikes me every time I make this particular pilgrimage is how genuinely democratic the queue feels, a proper cross-section of London at an hour when most other institutions have long since closed their doors, everyone united by the same simple, specific craving and the same shared willingness to stand outside in the cold to satisfy it.
Whatever else changes about this particular stretch of East London, and plenty has changed over the years, the queue itself feels like one of the genuinely durable constants, a small, strange, entirely wonderful bit of communal ritual that keeps drawing people back at the most unreasonable hours imaginable.
For more on Brick Lane’s broader history as a genuine East End institution, there’s a solid overview at Satire Examples.
More from this author at Cyndi Himmelstiere, prat.uk.