An east London bucket list

You know when you go to a party and you know that you'll see that boy you kissed who never texted, or the bloke you had a thing with but he let it just fizzle out, and you want to look damn good in hope that he feels a bit sad he let you go.

I don't think I've ever managed to do that - whenever there is any sort of occasion where I want to look nice, I crumble under the pressure and start experimenting with lilac eyeshadow and micro minis...

But today I've been out and about riding pedalos in Victoria Park, and strolling around Bethnal Green and she's certainly made me feel bad about leaving her. Sunshine, blossom galore on all the trees, people bustling around with arms full of fresh flowers from the Columbia Road flower market or sitting in Victoria Park drinking Sri Lankan chai tea and eating peanut butter and pomegranate tartines. Waaaaaaaa.

I am going to miss Bethnal Green so much when I move - eating artisan cheese at Broadway market on Saturday, buying flowers at Columbia road market and eating burritos on Brick Lane on Sunday... running and brunching in Victoria Park, eating and drinking out on Paradise Row, and just feeling so darn in the centre of everything.

So I've been trying to make sure I do all the things I wanted to do in and around Bethnal Green before I go. I will still work in Shoreditch, Bethy G's snazzier neighbour, so I figure I'll still get to hang around plenty there, but who knows how often I will stumble that extra half a mile down Bethnal Green Road...

Some of my favourite things for me to remember (or do this week if I haven't done them yet!) and things for you to do if you are around the area:

1. Flower shop on Sundays at Columbia Road
I love the crowds on Columbia road, and go and pick up flowers from there almost every Sunday. I head there just before the market closes at 3 when you can get some really good deals. Will finds the market crowds too much, but I don't mind it for a little while, and my walk there through the lovely little east London square is dreamy too. I once attempted to take slightly better photos on my big camera there, so will do a throwback post of all the beautiful Columbia road flowers soon...

2. Go and see a movie for less than a fiver at Richmix or Genesis
In these times of £12.50 Vue cinema tickets, I feel pleased as punch that I have not 1 but 2 cinemas where I can catch a flick for less than a fiver. At the top end of Bethnal Green road, you can see any film at Richmix for £5 (£6 if 3D) on Mondays or Tuesdays if you have an Idea store library card. And Richmix is probably the nicest and cleanest cinema I have ever been in - it does lots of foreign and art house films, plus some pretty wonderful events too. You can go and see a film (and eat pie!!) at Genesis cinema in Whitechapel for £4 on Mondays.

3. Pedalo on the lake in Victoria Park
Finally one of my bucket list dreams was fulfilled today (!) when my pal Rebecca and I went for a stroll, an oatmeal and raisin cookie and juice at the Pavillion (aaah) and half an hour on the pedalos in Victoria park. Much harder than I thought it would be, but that means I am going to count it as one of my exercises for the week...

Sorry for the scanky trainers...

4. Brunch at Bistrotechque
Pavillion does great brunches (as well as great cookies and juice) but the bookableness of Bistrotechque and the jazz pianist boosts it up in my book. Bistrotechque is a bit of a curve ball in terms of location, it is in the dodgier bit of Bethnal Green and tricky to find first time, but swanky and cool. It feels like you might be in New York. And the white decor and bloody maries are all you could possibly want and need on a hangover.

5. Vintage markets on Brick Lane
I'm sure I'll still pop to Brick Lane when I live South of the river, but it will be sad to not have it 10 minutes from my house when I am craving vintage clothing and market food. One of my favourite London memories is of walking home from the bus stop with my housemates, down Brick Lane after a night out South of the river. It was 4 something in the morning, and all the market stalls were setting up and it made me feel all triumphant about staying out so late (as I am generally an early to bed kinda gal).

6. Early morning swim in London fields lido
I went for my first swim outdoors of 2015 on Tuesday evening, and it broke my heart it could be one of my last outdoor swims in London fields lido. The place is heaving on sunny weekends, but fine on a pleasant evening after work. I am going to try it in the mornings before I go, though I sort of regret never taking a wintery dip there. Maybe I will have to save that for my new local lido when I move...

7. Pottery at Hackney City Farm
Hackney City farm - another fabulous breakfast venue, somewhere you can also see baby chicks and lambs and humongous pig and also pottery! My friend and Katy went there a couple of weeks ago, and once my pots have been in the kiln I'll be writing up a little review soon.

8. Go to the Tower of London for £1
If you live in the borough of Tower Hamlets, and you have a library card, you can go to the Tower of London for one bloomin pound instead of £22! That is a 95% off!

9. Tea at Tiosk
I am more of a green tea kinda girl than a coffee one, so this coffee shop for tea drinkers (though the do sell all the coffees too) is perfect for me. Every tea under the sun, perfect for taking away and then artistically strolling with through London Fields.

10. Breakfast at E. Pellici's
Quite possibly the thing I will miss the most about Bethnal Green is crossing over the road for breakfast at E. Pellici's every Saturday. Sure their fry up is damn good - think proper meaty sausages, freshly made hashbrowns and expertly grilled tomatoes, but the best thing are the people who work there. They are all such wonderfully friendly and eccentric people filling the little art deco cafe with chatter which switches seamlessly from Cockney to Italian. Every time I go in, they seem to be genuinely interested in how my week is going, want to show me pictures of their adorable babies, tease my boyfriend about his gym work out (the main guy walks past the gym window and sees him every day), treat me to custard tarts and the whole thing just gets my weekend off to such a great start. I will sorely sorely miss the Pellicis. You shouldn't come to Bethnal Green without a trip there (but FYI as an Italian Catholic family, E. Pellici's is of course closed on Sundays).

10 more to come in another post next weekend, but for now, I am off to enjoy this lovely evening sunshine, hope it is shining wherever you are too!

If you want to catch the rest of my list fosho, feel free to follow me on bloglovin! 

Town Halls

Bethnal Green Town Hall, 1965

After three and a half years, I am kicking the Bethnal Green bucket - this is my last weekend in Bethy G before I move to South East London (via perhaps the Chiltern Hills as we are yet to exchange on the flat we're buying...humph.) It is a little over 4 years since I rocked up to my first flat in Bethnal Green (I had a lovely mini sabbatical from the area between my 2 Bethy G flats, living on Camden Passage in Angel). 4 years. With or without the sabbatical, I've lived in this little corner of zone 2 for longer than I was at uni! And uni seemed like such an epic era of my life, I can't believe I've spent more of my adult life here than there.

Bethnal Green is an example of the typical gritty chic east London: pub A sells pints for £1.40 if you buy them before 11am. Across the road, pub B, doesn't open til 5, sells only "craft beers" and you can't buy a pint for less than a fiver. And next door pub C, is no longer a pub but has turned into a speakeasy with an extensive whisky based cocktail list.

In the time I've lived here Bethnal Green has changed quite a bit. It has been labelled this whole type as "up and coming" but when I first lived here, 70% of the pubs were type A's, now 70% are B's and C's. Where there were sari shops and fried chicken places, there are now prosecco bars and cat cafes. McDonalds wasn't open 24 hours and Paradise Row was just some railway arches behind a petrol station. But what has stood here the whole time, moving in at the same time as I did, is the Town Hall Hotel.

Well, the Town Hall itself has been as it was since 1910, but someone marched in and made it into a 5 star hotel in 2011. Yep, that is right Bethnal Green has a 5 star hotel! And, before I left Bethnal Green, one of my top things to do on my bucket list, was to visit it for a meal in their 3 AA rosette restaurant - the Typing Room. So, booking a few weeks in advance (as you need to to get a table here), I headed down there for what was meant to be my last Friday in Bethnal Green (but was actually 3 weeks ago, damn house buying slowness).

My rhubarb gin and tonic must have gone to my head, as I think I sort of melted down into relaxation and didn't take many snapshots to share, but to be honest, I wouldn't be able to match the amazing photography on their website and blog - here and here.

Basically the only photos I took, and 1 photo Will took when I was clearly too engrossed in the wine menu to notice...

They only do a tasting menu in the evenings, but you do get to choose between 5 courses and 7 courses and they will swap out anything you don't like. For 5 courses and the quality of food, I thought the cost was pretty good - £60 plus tip for 5 courses, £75 plus tip for 7. We went for 5. The food is a little experimental, but not a crazy "open this box of dry ice, pull out this mushroom which is actually a jellied pig ear" type of experimental. The menu changes reguarly - you can see an example here, but I really enjoyed what we were served that night - smoked reindeer, which they actually showed as smoking in a little oak box (!), chargrilled curried cauliflower, deep fried pigs trotters with bacon jam. For food that good, the atmosphere and service was friendly and relaxed.

I want to eat all my cauliflowers this way please. #5aday

It might seem a bit weird having something so luxe on Cambridge Heath Road, not the swishest of places or even of Bethnal Green, but actually I sort of liked that juxtaposition of a super swanky place, in less than swanky surroundings. Sort of like when you feel extra cosy when being driven down country roads in the dark, looking out at all the pitch black woods and fields and feeling all snuggled and safe inside. Anyone else have that? Anyhoo, that was sort of what it was like to sit in a grand hotel in the middle of an east London estate, drinking wine and eating foie gras.

I've come up with a little Bethnal Green bucket list, which I'll share next post, but ticking off dinner at the Town Hall was definitely a good start. You can book dinner at the Typing Room online here or if you fancy something more chillaxed, head to their bar or second restaurant.

Do you live in the east end or are visiting London soon? Try an east London walking tour.



Copyrights: The top photo is taken from Town Hall Hotel's website.

GIANT creme eggs - how to

I can still remember a time when, in my childish confusion, I'd assumed that the boxed creme egg easter eggs were just a giant version of the standard creme egg. I remember my disappointment at unboxing it, feeling like it weighed a little light and then biting in to realise it was hollow. Insert that emoji with a single rolling tear here. And the one of the monkey covering its eyes. Smarties eggs had little boxes of smarties in the middle,  jelly tots eggs had little bags of jelly tots (though don't even get me started on why these eggs are made of chocolate not jelly tot) so why oh why were cadbury's creme eggs not filled with half a kilogram of pure fondant?

Perhaps because that would be a horrifically unhealthy thing to give a child and would probably in one fell swoop exceed a month's recommended sugar allowance? Maybe, but if that is the case it is one the Guardian have overlooked when their reporter, Zoe Williams, set out with chocolatier Paul A Young to make their own giant sized creme egg!

You can get the recipe and the how to on their website here!

I attempted one this morning, and (as it is aimed at kids) it was pretty easy! I still cut corners though, filling an already made egg rather than tempering and moulding chocolate and I used golden marzipan instead of yellow fondant. 

Tomorrow I am heading back home to the Chiltern Hills, for some chill time with my family and for an easter egg hunt with my little cousins which my Dad has made me promise to lose. But who will be the real loser when I have in my handbag this giant creme egg ey?

(I am kidding, I'll share it of course, imagine the come down after that sized sugar high...)

PS. Do you love creme eggs enough to wear these leggings?

Source

How about making a salt scrub or your own amaretto this bank holiday weekend?

A quick review of Letters Live

Yesterday evening I went with my sister to the opening night of the five night stint of Letter's Live - a production where acclaimed and celebrated actors read aloud to an audience beautiful and important letters written by both super famous people and very ordinary people and in one case, a fictional person. 

It was held at the Freemason's Hall in Covent Garden (a beautiful building built in the 18th century, and historically a meeting place for the Freemasons - is it only me who can't help but envisage the Simpson's Stonecutters as soon as Freemasons are mentioned? anyhoo...) it's a building I've always wanted to go in, and was almost - but not quite - as beautiful as the letters themselves.

Letters Live, which has previously popped up at Hay Literary Festival, at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Southbank Centre to name just a few, describes itself as "a celebration of the enduring power of literary correspondance" and I guess that describes it just right.

The event certainly pulled in the big names this time, with Benedict Cumberbatch reading every night, alongside plenty of other amazing thinkers and performers - Russell Brand, Caitlin Moran, Richard Holloway, Juliet Stevenson and Louise Brealey to name a few. Tom Odell provided a few musical interludes, songs about letters ending on Fats Waller, "I am going to sit down and write myself a letter" which suited Tom's folksy slow rockish spin so perfectly.

There were rofl-icious letters, like the letter to (and reply from) Barbara Bush by Marge Simpson, Nick's Cave letter to MTV asking for his nomination for best male artist to be withdrawn (no thank you - he's not competitive), and the memo from South Park movie creators to the agency which rated the age certificate suitable for the film. "Although it is not animated yet, we put a new storyboard in for clarification in the scene with Saddam Hussein's penis. The intent is you never see Saadam's real penis, he is in fact using a dildo both times"...

And then there were letters that actually made me well up and cry a little, and I got so invested in these other people's relationships, even though they had only been read for 5 minutes and I hadn't even heard of the penman or the recipient before yesterday. So many beautiful letters from men and women so desperately in love with someone who had left them - by dying, by falling out of love, by just being a bit crap. 

In someways I sort of felt like I was intruding in some private space of the people who had written them, they were never meant for my eyes and ears after all. But mainly it was everything to see all that love and all that humour in all these letters, to sit and wonder about the writers and to remember how similar and connected we are as humans, regardless of where we are from, the troubles we are facing or which century we are living in.

I wonder if in 100 years time, people will read my drunken love texts to Will and think they are a beautiful and real expression of love?! Looking at the last drunk text I sent Will (future text readers would have to sort their way through quite a lot of "I'll be 15 mins" and "did you remember to get the chicken out to defrost?" if they decided to look for my love texts) it reads "I love you! Now where are you and my creme egg mcflurry?" Maybe not the stuff of theatre... 

I panic bought tickets to Live Letters, not even know who I could spiel into going, thought about selling them and I am just so glad I did go, and I said yes, made me realise I really should do it more often!

And by the end of the night I felt like quite the cultural biatch. Or should I say cumberbitch....

It is pretty tricky to get tickets to Letters Live in Freemason's Hall now, but you can try here, or otherwise keep your eye out for the next lot here.

And finally a couple of videos to help you procrastinate! Fats Waller and Homer Simpson:

Like the sounds of Letters Live - how about Hay Festival?