On London Extra: Where is cool?
Leyton, Walthamstow, etcetera, etcetera. Plus HS2 manoeuvres, curbing extremism, Conservatives lose compass, Stirling prize shortlist and much more
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"Oooh, shall we go there?" said a woman to her friend as I passed them on Orford Road E17, heading for the freshly-opened branch of Gail's. The naughtiness of the idea! The tempting taste of cultural transgression!
You will recall the furore of August, when the posh bakery chain announced it would be opening a branch in the "village" bit of Walthamstow. A petition was raised against it, whose main effect was to attract silly season attention and reveal some of the left-populist oppositional politics that have been picking up trade in and around that part of the capital for a while.
None of this was ever going to stop Gail's opening another set of doors in London (right next to the local Labour Party office too). And when I dropped by for elevenses yesterday it was no surprise to find it had attracted plenty of customers, plenty more media interest and no uprising against it by furious locals that I could see.
I won't reprise the reasons I found the outbreak of anti-Gail's attitudes a bit facile and, in some respects, sinister (see below a link to what I wrote at the time). Suffice to say that if any of the handful of independent cafés and bakeries along the street have closed by the spring as a result of Gail's arriving, I will be surprised.
Instead, let's take a few steps back and reflect upon the psychology of place, taste and personal finances at work in that bit of east London and some other parts of the city.
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