London's Brick Lane Audiowalk
Buy and Download New Banglatown Guided Walk for iPod or MP3 Player
Soundmap's new London Audiowalk for iPod or MP3 player has author Tarquin Hall guiding walkers around Brick Lane with music and tales of Banglatown and Jewish history.
London's Brick Lane is one of the city's most fascinating areas, and who better to act as a guide in this new audiowalk than Tarquin Hall, acclaimed author of Salaam Brick Lane. Brick Lane is the latest title in an enterprising series of London walking guides that you can buy buy to download for your iPod or MP3 player from the website of Soundmap.
Previous guides in the series have covered Soho with Irma Kurtz, Camden with Robert Elms, the King's Road in Chelsea with Max Décharné, and Brixton with Alex Wheatle. Each writer talks and guides you through their local patch of London, with background music and sound, and interviews with local characters.
The Brick Lane walk, like the others in the series, is designed to take about an hour, although it will obviously be longer if you call into some of the shops on the way, and into one of Brick Lane's great curry houses, which are some of the best in London.
Brick Lane isn't just Banglatown and curry houses, though. It has long been one of the corners of London that new immigrants first head to. Even before the Asian people started settling there, it had been home to the Jewish community. Tarquin Hall starts his walk not in a Brick Lane curry restaurant but outside Beigel Bake, at 159 Brick Lane, where you should start by buying and munching on a tasty bagel.
The Brick Lane Bakery is open 24/7, as an interview with one of the people who works there confirms. This is 72-year-old Sammy, who came to London from Israel when he was 21 and whose lovely Jewish voice tells how they make the best bagels in London, because they learned the old-fashioned way. Hall explains that it was opposite this shop where he himself lived, and how the experience inspired him to research the history of this area and its people.
The author tells how it was once an entirely Jewish neighborhood, and it was from the Jews that the later Bangladeshi immigrants learned the tailoring trade. But he takes us back even further, to the late 17th century, when this was a muddy track outside the City of London. Brick Lane probably got its name because this was the way that bricks were taken into the city to rebuild it after the Fire of London.
Tarquin Hall's walk basically takes visitors in a straight line from north to south down Brick Lane, with a short side diversion through Spitalfields to see Christ Church on Commercial Street, Nicholas Hawksmoor's famous creation. It takes in the Battle of Cable Street in the 1930s, with an interview with a witness to the events. It's this kind of first-hand experience that makes good podcasts such wonderful ways of getting to know a place. They draw you into the area, and don't merely let you pass through clutching a guidebook. Guidebooks also tend to gloss over subjects like politics and racial tension, but it's history like this that make places like Brick Lane so fascinating to visit. They're real places, whereas somewhere like Oxford Street is just a shopping street that could be in any city in the world.
Soundmap are to be congratulated for covering parts of London that are not on the main tourist trail, like Brick Lane and Brixton, and encouraging people to go there using these intelligent and informative audiowalk guides.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
The Brick Lane audiowalk costs £5.99 and is supplied with a map. Download it at the Soundmap website.
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Click here to read about Soundmap's London audiowalks for Soho, Camden and King's Road.
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