Brick Lane
— — the street that keeps changing hands and staying itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A long, narrow street running north from Whitechapel through the East End. Brick Lane takes its name from the brick and tile kilns that worked the local clay in the fifteenth century, and has spent the centuries since hosting one immigrant community after another — Huguenots, Irish, Ashkenazi Jews, and from the 1970s the Bangladeshi community that gave the street its run of curry houses and the name Banglatown. The Truman Brewery anchors the middle stretch, with weekend markets spilling into the side streets. The walls carry an evolving layer of street art. — from the studio
Brick Lane, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Brick Lane runs roughly one kilometre north from Whitechapel High Street to Bethnal Green Road, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The name dates to the fifteenth century, when the local clay supported brick and tile kilns along the lane. From the late seventeenth century onward the street housed successive immigrant populations: French Huguenot silk-weavers, then Irish dockworkers, then a large Ashkenazi Jewish community through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and from the 1970s a Bangladeshi community whose curry houses and grocers gave the southern stretch the informal name Banglatown. The Old Truman Brewery, founded in 1666, occupies the central block.
The street is busiest on Sundays, when the Brick Lane Market, the Truman Brewery markets, and the nearby Spitalfields Market all run together into a single weekend crowd that fills the side streets. The Jamme Masjid at the south end of the street is itself a layered building — built in 1743 as a Huguenot chapel, later a Methodist chapel, then a synagogue, and from 1976 a mosque. Two long-running 24-hour bagel shops at the northern end have outlasted most of the trends around them. Street art changes weekly along the brick walls between the brewery and Bethnal Green Road.
The Brick Lane streetscape is a Victorian-and-Georgian terrace at its core, with eighteenth-century weavers' houses still visible along Princelet Street and Fournier Street to the west. The Truman Brewery's tall brick chimney and clock are the most-recognised silhouette on the lane. The street's name and fabric both come from the same clay — London brick earth — that built much of the East End. The Jamme Masjid carries a sundial on its eastern wall, dated 1743, with the Latin motto Umbra Sumus, We Are Shadow, a quiet remainder of the building's first congregation.