Thirteen for Dinner

A dozen members of Liberal Democrat Youth and Students (LDYS) and I had a very jolly, social dinner at a Balti House just off Brick Lane, in London’s Banglatown. Some soon discovered that the Café Raj’s descriptor ‘fairly spicy’ was the Bengali equivalent of British understatement, but the curry and the Cobra beer certainly helped make the evening go with a swing. The area has been transformed since I first started haunting Tower Hamlets over 20 years ago. As I walked along Brick Lane on my way home, there were literally hundreds of predominantly young people dining al fresco, enjoying a balmy spring evening that made a perfect beginning to the long Easter weekend. The Council has clamped down on aggressive restaurant touts recently, so you can negotiate your way along the narrow street virtually unmolested these days.

There’s been a terrific argument in the local paper, the East London Advertiser, over a suggestion to change the name of Aldgate East tube station to ‘Brick Lane’, largely, I suspect, in the hope of attracting even more tourists, to make Banglatown a sort of second Notting Hill. One person who helped put Brick Lane on the map, of course, was the novelist Monica Ali, whose eponymous book I loved, though powerful voices within the local Bangladeshi community hated it, asserting that the rather distasteful husband of the main character was somehow a parody of all Bengali men, rather than a solitary, rather pathetic individual. And some of the businesses on Brick Lane itself effectively vetoed the film of the book being shot on location. A pity, I believe — not just because of the important principle of artistic freedom, but also because it would have helped give many people unfamiliar with the area an insight into this vibrant and fascinating community, warts and all.

Links: www.ldys.org.uk and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Ali