As a tourist visiting the East London may not be your first choice…unless you are more of an explorer and love to go a bit off the beaten track!
East London is anything but the white polished area you may find around Sloan Square, Chelsea or Mayfair, but is getting more and more attention for its vintage markets around Brick Lane, quite popular for its trendy young residents, artists and vibrant night-life. Matteo’s mum came to visit us last week for a couple of days and after her day tour around the city she suggested us where it would be great for us to live: Belgravia ahahah a bit over our budget for the moment but yes, totally different from the Mile End-Stepney Green area where we are now.
Last Saturday I met a friend for lunch and then decided to take a walk from Bishopsgate to Broadway Market and then back walking randomly to find something cool by serendipity on our way home.
Our “tour” started at Pizza Express: although the Pizza is not amazing, it is nice enough for a quick meal, the service is quick and the prices are quite competitive, especially when you subscribe to their newsletter and get a notification every time there is an offer, such as 2 for 1 meal deals or, as for this time, the second main for 45p. Hurrah!
So check out what’s going on each week…
We walked to Hackney Farm, through Spietalfields market, Hanbury Street (where we visited a vintage market) and Columbia Road, to find out what animals and products we could find at the farm.
Hackney City Farm is not huge, but to be in such a central location it is surprising to find so many animals, such as cows, goats, pigs, a donkey and numerous chickens and ducks. You can also have a tea and cake in their nice restaurant “Frizzante Café”, meet the animals at around 4pm for their feeding time, and I guess you can even buy some fresh eggs if you’d like to.
My friend and I have been impressed by Henrietta the pig, who responded to her owner’s grunts and finally got up for the kids and our pleasure!
We eventually left the farm walking to Broadway Market. The market is similar to Borough Market in terms of food quality and variety, but much smaller in terms of stalls number. If you are looking for fresh vegetables, cheese, bread and cakes this is a nice place to go on a Saturday, close to the canal, combined with a nice mix of vintage clothes and accessories stalls.
We’ve tried a bit of everything within the stalls, including cheese, olives and olive oil products from Italy 
We walked back following the canal and came out on Kingsland road, stopping at a Chinese supermarket to take some pictures of colourful noodles packages and find products I’ve never ever heard of in my entire life. Exploring other’s culture’s supermarkets is a trip itself and I strongly recommend it to anyone. Buying it and cooking it is another story… but we’ve seen several people with books and magazines with Chinese recipes looking for ingredients impossible to find anywhere else.
We finished our nice day out hours later with an Italian style aperitivo at the Boundary Rooftop. I’ve heard of this place before but I thought it was too posh or to expensive to try, but since we where in the mood for anything different we gave it a go. I found the Boundary is a very special place and spot in London, nice good quality people and nice décor, although the view I could get sitting on the benches was not as cool as I expected.
I decided to start with an Italian white wine that was served in a normal water glass, and not in a nice wine glass as I was expecting, but I was in good company and sitting in the sunshine at that point sounded just as the perfect place to be. The service was ok, and the prices where more or less the same as any other central bar, 4.50£ for a glass of wine and 3.50£ for a Peroni.
That’s all for me now and I can’t wait to try something new again and tell you more about it.
