East London on foot, before the gallery opens

East London has been gentrifying for so long that the gentrification itself has become an artefact. The first wave was the artists in the 1990s; the second was the bankers' wives in the early 2000s; the third was the laptop class in the mid-2010s. Each wave has left a sediment of cafés, second-hand bookshops, and small galleries, and the result is not the disaster the locals predicted but rather a strange archaeological record of three consecutive generations of newcomers, each of whom thought they were the last.

I walked it on a Saturday morning in February, starting at Bethnal Green and finishing four hours later in Hoxton Square. The route is approximately the route every weekend guide describes, but on a Saturday morning in February there are no other walkers, and the route therefore becomes the city itself rather than a curated version of the city.

Bethnal Green

I started at the V&A Museum of Childhood, which is closed on Saturday mornings until ten, which means the small square in front of it is empty and the museum's reflecting pool reflects only sky. The pool is the single most photogenic municipal feature in east London. Nobody mentions it because everyone is photographing the wall on the other side of the square.

The first artist wave left behind cafés; the second left galleries; the third left empty shops that nobody can afford to take over.

From the museum I walked north up Cambridge Heath Road, then west into Columbia Road. The flower market is on Sundays, not Saturdays, which means Saturday is the day to walk it without the crowds. The stallholders are setting up tomorrow's pitches; the cafés are open but quiet. There is a particular small shop on Columbia Road that sells nothing but vintage botanical prints, and the owner has been there since 1998, and the shop has not redecorated once.

Hackney Road and a small detour

I detoured north up Hackney Road as far as the canal, then doubled back. The canal in February is grey and beautiful. The footpath along it is empty. The houseboats are present but quiet. There is one café on the canal that sells only filter coffee — no espresso, no oat milk, no aesthetic — and it is the only place I will recommend by name in this essay, because the owner is older than I am and has earned the press: it is called The Marrow, it is near Broadway Market, and you cannot miss it.

Brick Lane and Shoreditch

From the canal I cut south through the back streets to Brick Lane. The street market — Sundays — was not happening. The bagel shops were open. I ate a bagel at the older of the two bagel shops, which has been open since 1855 in some form or other. The newer one is two doors down and has slightly better bagels, but the older one is the one I keep coming back to, partly out of sentiment and partly because the queue at the newer one is rarely worth it.

Shoreditch proper begins at the bottom of Brick Lane, at the junction with Bethnal Green Road. The galleries are open on a Saturday afternoon but most of them are closed until eleven, which gave me an hour to walk through the streets and look at the walls. The walls of Shoreditch are the most over-photographed in Europe; they are still, somehow, interesting on a Saturday morning when nobody else is looking.

Why I wrote this

I wrote this because the standard east London walk — the one in every guidebook — is a tour rather than a walk. The tour takes you to Brick Lane and Shoreditch and tells you what to think. The walk lets you arrive at Brick Lane and Shoreditch and notice that you have already been walking for two hours through equally good streets that the tour skipped because they have less to monetise.