Urban Culture & History Tour at Brick Lane & Spitalfields

Duration: 2-4 hours

Rates

• Adults: £55
• Students: £30

About

Brick Lane and Spitalfields markets and shops are bursting with outstanding design and exciting creativity -- as well exciting vintage waiting to be discovered.

But there's so much more.

For the history of silk weaving and garment making here is dramatic, impressive, sometimes painful and moving, as waves of immigrants kept coming, from the eighteenth-century French Huguenots, to the Irish and Eastern European Jews in the nineteenth, to the Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers in the late 20th, with traces of all these groups still around today, including of course the curry houses.

On this tour, we mix up the history with the visits to shops and market stalls. One minute you're deciding if you really must have that 1970s tweed jacket and the next minute you're considering how a new wildflower or two woven on a 1770s silk dress could make a grand lady look oh-so-fashionable. The past is woven into the present constantly, in the clothes, but also in the buildings, the smells, the graffiti, and the great characters we meet along the way, whose stories become part of your own unique experience of London's East End.

What to bring

• Wear very comfortable shoes
• Consider bringing a water bottle
• Check the weather and wear waterproofs in case of rain.