It’s quite humdrum, but mostly in a nice way
What’s going for it? The new Walthamstow. Or that might be Leyton, I forget. Or Maryland. Or Forest Gate. There are so many contenders for Outer East End Hotspot these days I can’t keep up. Blame 2012. The Olympics splattered money round these parts, in the form of newly minted bollards and cheery paint schemes. It also divided opinion. Strike up a conversation about “it” in the queue at Percy Ingle on the High Road and six years later you’re still likely to leave with a flea in your ear as well as a sliced bloomer. Still, Leytonstone appears on good form. The tootsie toes of Epping Forest dip into the streets to the north, its Hollow Ponds green space fringed by office workers on their lunch break, dreaming of escape over BLTs. A few blocks south, conversely, escapees from the rest of the planet have come to rest on the High Road, from Romanian delis to Turkish grills to Madame Chic’s “frizerie”. There are even signs of those most benighted of immigrants: artists. They’ve lived round here since the 1980s (the 1890s if you include native ’Stoner Alfred Hitchcock), famously adding chutzpah to the M11 Link Road protests a decade later. These days the art’s less bolshie (though July’s Arts Trail is a blast) and more conceptual macramé, but at least the gentrifiers haven’t invaded in full force yet.
The case against… Sliced by that M11 Link Road, belching pollution. Quite humdrum (but mostly in a nice way). Still a long way from the kool kats in Hackney and the Stow, if that’s your ambition.
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