High Street 2012 1) ALDGATE (EAST) Middlesex St to Commercial St
Aldgate's where London changes. To the west the towering blocks of the City, loaded with hard-won wealth and insurance money. And to the east, well, absolutely nothing like that at all. Aldgate's like a financial fault line across the capital, dividing the cufflinked from the unemployed and the well-heeled from the trainered. It's no accident that London's Olympic marathon will run round the western Aldgate roundabout twice, and the eastern roundabout just the once.
And this gyratory system is where High Street 2012 begins. Forget that interesting looking church, and that really ancient pub, and that spot where a Roman city gate once stood, and those lovely well-tended flowerbeds - they're on the wrong side of the divide. No, our first stop is a giant bleak traffic island cut off from the surrounding ordinariness through a warren of desolate subways. For reasons best known to themselves, local planners in the 70s and 80s thought that what this area needed was a mess of large scale office blocks and a subterranean shopping centre. They were very wrong about the shopping centre. The florists and coffee shops of Aldgate Barrs were never busy, maybe because no ground level passer-by would ever have guessed they existed, and this gloomy mall is now boarded up at both ends and lost to the world. I doubt that anybody misses it.
But Aldgate is in flux. Major roadworks are underway in an attempt to end the dominance of the car and to give pedestrians priority. And about time too. Stand here in the rush hour and you can watch City workers ignoring ubiquitous safety barriers to risk their lives crossing a relentless four-lane one-way system. Anything, absolutely anything, rather than waste time wandering through that labyrinth of forbidding subways [photo]. At the very top of High Street 2012 a pristine white four-pointed traffic island has appeared, its traffic lights still shrouded beneath bright orange covers [photo]. Even more heretical, push-button pelican crossings have sprouted ready to halt the oncoming vehicles. Deroundabouting is expected imminently. By Christmas a new cut-through feeder road will have been established, which will lead to the pedestrianisation of the whole of Braham Street (to be infilled with leafy public realm). To be honest it's a wonder Boris hasn't yet cancelled the Aldgate Masterplan, given the delays it'll bring to his beloved traffic flow.
Eastern Aldgate is currently a great big building site, in a wholly transformational but not yet got anywhere so still a complete mess kind of a way. One of the centrepieces of this change will be the Aldgate Tower, a curvaceous 16 storey landmark building, currently little more than a few straggly pipes and a series of fenced-off trenches. Nextdoor, on a similarly evacuated site [photo], are the foundations of Aldgate Place (who comes up with these names, have they no imagination?). This'll be another shiny glass tower, sliced diagonally in two because architects like to be a bit quirky like that. But for now only a futuristic entrance to Aldgate East tube station [photo], recently arisen out of the furrowed earth, gives a physical clue to the City extension to come. Give it time, and the prosperous end of town will have inched a few yards further east.
four local sights » Tubby Isaacs: A proper East End jellied eelstall, tucked away on the corner of Goulston Street outside the Aldgate Exchange pub. It's £2.50 per pot of wriggly chewy stuff, or four quid for medium or a fiver for large. Established 1919, and there's depressingly little else round here as old, or as loved. (The kid in this photo shot me a withering glance after I took the shot. I thought he was a customer, but it turns out he works here and was just tweaking the condiments. He is not, I repeat not, Tubby Isaacs)[kid-free photo] » Aldgate East station: Gloomy underground chamber, with most of its heritage tiling removed, which Metronet were in the middle of upgrading/destroying when they went bust. » Royal Bank of Scotland: Not content with posting record-breaking losses, the RBS's staff have the misfortune to work in a soulless brown HQ isolated in the middle of the Aldgate East roundabout without even a coffee shop to support them. My heart bleeds for the bankers, obviously. » Sportec: Aldgate's very own Trainer Temple, where the shelves are piled high with Converse, Skechers, Reebok and whatever else the trendy mainstream are wearing footwearwise this season. A big poster of Mikey Streets beams out from below the counter, and there's a tastefully discreet menswear section tucked away at the back. For da yoof, and for everyone. [photo]
High Street 2012
Aldgate's where London changes. To the west the towering blocks of the City, loaded with hard-won wealth and insurance money. And to the east, well, absolutely nothing like that at all. Aldgate's like a financial fault line across the capital, dividing the cufflinked from the unemployed and the well-heeled from the trainered. It's no accident that London's Olympic marathon will run round the western Aldgate roundabout twice, and the eastern roundabout just the once.
But Aldgate is in flux. Major roadworks are underway in an attempt to end the dominance of the car and to give pedestrians priority. And about time too. Stand here in the rush hour and you can watch City workers ignoring ubiquitous safety barriers to risk their lives crossing a relentless four-lane one-way system. Anything, absolutely anything, rather than waste time wandering through that labyrinth of forbidding subways [photo]. At the very top of High Street 2012 a pristine white four-pointed traffic island has appeared, its traffic lights still shrouded beneath bright orange covers [photo]. Even more heretical, push-button pelican crossings have sprouted ready to halt the oncoming vehicles. Deroundabouting is expected imminently. By Christmas a new cut-through feeder road will have been established, which will lead to the pedestrianisation of the whole of Braham Street (to be infilled with leafy public realm). To be honest it's a wonder Boris hasn't yet cancelled the Aldgate Masterplan, given the delays it'll bring to his beloved traffic flow.
four local sights
