Gözleme, a Turkish flatbread made of flour, water and oil, cooked dry on a hotplate, stuffed and folded with a choice of two fillings: potato and onion; spinach and cheese.
There are two women sitting on the floor in the window of the Saray Broadway Café, legs outstretched, making flatbreads, which they cook on a hotplate. The café has plastic chairs with tube-framed legs fixed to tables, which are also screwed to the floor, in the style of a greasy spoon. These women are not in headscarves in the window during the week, but the Broadway Market is on a Saturday with its artisan breads, cheeses and vegan brownie squares at £4.50 a go.
The market is crowded on a hot day. The sun is in its third or fourth week of belting down relentlessly, turning the grass yellow in nearby London Fields.
Radu, Jamie and Maria in Greenwich, 2017
We are four: my husband, my brother, his boyfriend and I, and we opt to take our Gözleme into the park, to sit in the shade of the London Plane trees. The Gözleme are £3 each. We buy cans of drink in a nearby international supermarket. The hot wraps are stashed into brown paper bags inside a blue plastic one. Even with the walk to find a combination of bench and shade, then opting for just shade, the Gözleme are piping. Jamie, my brother, advises eating the edges first, to allow the filling to cool from its volcanic temperature. It’s delicious, the spinach and unspecified grated cheese. Jamie and Radu, his boyfriend, are vegan, so have the only other option: potato and onion. As I suspected, filling enough without the vegan cakes that the boys had added to their lunch menu.
People are out on blankets with small children and small dogs, the latter occasionally invading our circle of folded legs and stretched out bodies to sniff and say hello. Balloons are attached to trees and party food is carried across the grass to other circles of bodies all over the park. Buff, tattooed young men, stripped of their shirts, display their athleticism on the outdoor gym equipment. The entrances to the Lido and café can be seen in the distance; a film crew set up by a row of houses at the edge of the park.
Jamie tells me that Broadway Market was very run down when he first lived in Hackney, before the hipsters moved in and property prices soared. A patch of wasteland outside his low-rise block of flats, where foxes once roamed, is now filled with new apartments, with the obligatory ‘affordable housing’ going for upwards of £450,000 for a one-bedroom flat. The social housing element of the development, what we used to call Council Housing, has a separate entrance to the privately-owned dwellings enclosing a gated square.
We stop by the building that used to be a Housing Benefit office, now called Mare Street Market, an open space of café, cocktail bars and small businesses. The hubbub is unbearable, with diners sharing long, canteen-style tables and paying £5 for a half round of bacon sandwich. On artisan bread, of course.
Back in Broadway Market, there is the odd café that has survived gentrification, including F. Cooke, an eel pie and mash joint, like the one I knew when I lived in Woolwich in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with white-tiled walls. An older man sits by the door at the end of the counter, waiting for a single customer to cross the threshold.
It is forty years since I first moved to London, thirty years since I moved on to Kent. The landscape has changed beyond recognition. As we drove from Kent to Hackney that morning, the crane-like roof structures on the O2 came into view on the East Greenwich peninsula, which was mostly derelict and empty when I lived nearby. The shining towers of banks and hotels rose on the other side of the Thames as we entered the Blackwall Tunnel. Some of the places where I lived where once considered undesirable. Bathrooms shared with other tenants, water heaters, cookers and gas fires condemned as dangerous. Now houses in those streets are beyond the reach of locals or students (as I was) staying on beyond the end of their degrees.
As for my brother, nearly twenty years in Hackney, his local authority rent is controlled and his tenancy protected. He would no longer be able to live in the area if he were to start over, find a new place to live.
Sixty Firsts
I shall be sixty years old in September 2019. I am aiming to do sixty things for the first time before that date, many of them small. This was the first time I had eaten Gözleme, and my first visit to London Fields.
