Salaam Brick Lane

A Year In The New East End

After ten years living abroad, Tarquin Hall wanted to return to his native London. Lured by his nostalgia for a leafy suburb childhood spent in south-west London, he returned with his Indian-born, American fiancée in tow. Priced out of the housing market, they found themselves living not in a townhouse, oozing Victorian charm . . . but in a squalid attic above a Bangladeshi sweatshop on London's Brick Lane. A grimy skylight provided the only window on their new world: a filthy, noisy street where drug dealers and prostitutes peddled their wares and tramps urinated on the pavements. At night, traffic lights lit up the ceiling and police sirens wailed into the early hours. Yet, as Hall got to know Brick Lane, he discovered beneath its unlovely surface an inner world where immigrants and asylum seekers struggle to better themselves and dream of escape. He met the last of the East End Jews who, in their lifetimes, have watched their community slowly vanish, and he befriended some of the tens of thousands of Bangladeshis and asylum seekers who have replaced them. 'Salaam Brick Lane' is a journey of discovery by an outsider in his own native city.