Background: About Dalston
In between 'up and coming' Stoke Newington and the some would say 'up its own ass' Shoreditch and Old Street area, lies Dalston - Hackney's hidden jewel. From the bottom of Stamford Hill (one of London's Hasidic Jewish enclaves), Stoke Newington High Street begins, bisecting a straight line through the outer edges of Stoke Newington itself. This road, without so much as a kink or a break, morphs into Kingsland Road and continues its Roman-like route through Dalston and on towards Shoreditch. We shall take a little walk from approximately where Kingsland Road begins, straight down until we take a left onto Ridley Road where we'll find, awaiting us, the amazing Ridley Road market. The two main cultural influences in this vibrant area are Turkish and African.
The Turkish influence
Food
If you are travelling by bus down the Kingsland Road you can catch the 67, 76, 149 or 243 - all of which go to Old Street, Shoreditch or Liverpool Street Station. Starting from the Yucutan (a huge Irish pub with many TV screens showing live football matches constantly) one can't help but feel immediately the massive Turkish influence on the area. Opposite the Yucutan pub is Costcutters (or Dogin Gida Bazaar, sometimes affectionately called 'The Dodgy Geezer'), a Turkish grocery store open 24 hours a day.
A bit further down on the right hand side is the Aziziye Halal Restaurant situated in and below the white-marbled Aziziye Mosque. Turkish, Kurdish, Bangladeshi, Nigerian and British all come to the Aziziye to eat the reasonably priced Turkish grub. From mercîmek çorbasi (lentil soup) to hellîm börek (pasty filled with feta cheese and parsley) for starters, to main dishes such as the ubiquitous Îskender kebap (Adama kebab bedded on a special home-made bread with tomato sauce, yoghurt, parsley and butter on top).
It's delicious stuff and won't hit you too hard in the pocket . Walking a little further down Kingsland Road, you pass more and more Turkish restaurants, some of which advertise their fare completely in the Turkish language - Turkish shop signs, Turkish menus - and this total absence of the English language somehow authenticates these places to the point of extreme exoticism. This is the real deal; Turkish food, made by Turkish people, explicitly for its own Turkish community.
In fact, the London Borough of Hackney is said to house a 50,000-strong Turkish community with a further 250,000 spread throughout the rest of London. Although Hackney has had a Turkish community for a number of years now, it wasn't until the problems in the Middle East erupted in the early 1990s that Dalston's Turkish and Kurdish population really 'exploded' with many persecuted Kurds arriving in Britain seeking political asylum. Also, many Turks had been working away in the Middle East earning, in the main, a good living. When the troubles began however, they fled back home to Turkey, only to find it hard to sustain the standard of living to which they had become accustomed.
And so they moved again; this time to destinations throughout Europe, most notably to Berlin and Hamburg in Germany and of course, to London. And what better way then for a displaced people to feel 'at home', as it closes its collective eyes for a minute to breathe in those familiar smells of the Turkish kitchen. There's something remarkably touching about eating the same food in exile as that which was probably served up by many mothers back home, years ago, possibly in happier times.
Music
The Efe - Express Ticaret shop, run by the warmly-intelligent and laid-back proprietor, Turgay Haqlil, sells nothing but Turkish music. Row upon row of cassettes and CDs line the walls inside the store. From older men with bushy moustaches who, one imagines, play a more traditional kind of music, to the younger generation, all outrageously contorted in a variety of coquettish poses, this gallery of Turkish faces beams down relentlessly in a collective hair-sprayed pose straight out of the 1980s. This is not to demean the music, though. Indeed, such luminaries as Ibrahim Tallises and the mega-star, Tarkan, are known and respected throughout much of the world.
Football
In the same way that most of Britain's social activity is centred around the pub, Turkish men while away many hours in any number of small cafés and 'members only' (men only) clubs spread throughout the borough. Often these clubs will be affiliated to a football club back home, such as FC Fenerbahce, FC Galatasaray and FC Besiktas, and as you walk by and peer in you'll most likely see men smoking cigarettes, sat around tables sipping tea or coffee from little glasses, playing cards. Often a solitary TV in the corner will show Turkish programmes; soap operas, news bulletins and of course, football matches. All in all these places must hold a peculiarly Turkish appeal, being in the main thoroughly spartan and very 'male'.
Continuing the walk down Kingsland Road, you pass various chemists, a dentist's surgery, a taxi car service, a small solicitor's office, a primary school with new Adidas-sponsored basket ball hoops, Turkish laundry services, flower shops and photographic studios where they'll re-touch your features to take years off what's evidently been a hard life so far. You see, Dalston's poor but it's somehow not desperate. True, it's a bit scruffy, a bit tatty in places, and if you sniff the air hard enough you'll make out the faint tang of criminality (the odd burnt-out shell of a car off a side road which the council refuse to remove). But trouble begets trouble, and if you keep your nose clean and be 'aware', you'll be fine... touch wood. Dalston is an incredible mix of races, and on the surface at least, it really seems to work.
The African influence
Go past the marvellous little one-screen Rio cinema on your right and almost imperceptibly the vibe gets less Turkish and more African and Afro-Carribean. The Akwaaba supermarket, 'a Carribean Food Shop in Association with the living Gospel International Ministry' according to the shop front, is a pokey wee store selling corn maize, smoked fish heads, maize husks, gari flour, cassava, puna yams, ken key made from corn - a bit like dumplings, bottles of Zomi oil from palm trees, bags of stinking dried shrimps, hot pepper sauce made from the African shietu pepper, and great hunks of African soap wrapped in paper. Most of these products are imported from Ghana.
Ridley Road Market
Ridley Road market is a truly great place to walk around. To meander in and out of its stalls and to absorb the noise and the vibe, well... it's a joy; something akin to seeing one's notion of the very essence of life itself made real before your eyes. And this is not mere hyperbole; it bustles, it jostles, it smells, it's noisy, it tests your patience, it tires you out, it's completely fascinating, at turns its comic and then somehow seems poignant. In short, it's alive. It goes without saying that nobody knows 'what life is', but perhaps to liken life to the market place, the market square, is not such a crass metaphor.
And Ridley Road market is a damn fine example. The mixture of races rubbing shoulders with each other is incredible: Indian, Chinese, Jamaican, old time Londoners (ie, pre-yuppy), Turkish, African - they're all here, buying provisions, chatting away in all manner of languages and dialects. And the food on sale is amazing: dates, custard apples, big fat avocados, pomegranites, sharon fruit, mangos, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, puna yams, bags of garlic, thousands of chillis, a whole array of scary blackened smoked fish heads, and even rolls of dried, cured cow skin. One stall sells nothing but fresh eggs of every grade imaginable and the various fishmongers sell between them fresh tuna, coley fillets, live crabs, squid, octopus, salmon, cod, tilapia, skate, red snappers and psychadelic parrot fish. Often reggae sounds blasting out of somebody's portable stereo will provide the soundtrack to your market experience; that and the continual patter from the market traders - 'Come on, now. Have a look!', 'Here we go! Ten lemons, fifty. Fifty pence for yer lemons'.
It's not just food that's on sale, but loads of stalls sell cheap clothes; little coloured ragga-muffin string vests for all young Bob Marley juniors, cheap denim, t-shirts and bargain-priced trainers. There are also stalls selling Indian, African and Turkish fabrics (one stall is the beautifully named 'Fabrik Afrique'). Then you have pots and pans, rolls of wallpaper and imported Jamaican health remedies. There is even a stall selling bibles and religious tapes and videos. Above the stall holder is the sign that reads:
Is your life blessed or cursed? Let God change your curse into a blessing. God will make a way when there seems to be no way.
It would be all too predictable and patronizing for the occasional visitor to imbue the scene and those folk before him with a sense of exoticism born out of his own fancy, made possible by the fact that he's just visiting, and can leave. After all, those that work the stalls every day and those that always shop the markets probably know what it's like to struggle a bit for money (Dalston's Ridley Road market is most definitely not the King's Road2). The folk you find down the market (and in Dalston in general) probably know what it's like to have a hard life, to be out of work at times, to know a thing or two about racial discrimination; whose lives might well be genuinely hard. But that's not to say they're happy or unhappy; who can tell that?
But you take as you find, speak of what you see, and after many years of walking down Kingsland Road, ending up at Ridley Road market, one can never tire of the amazing vibe of the place, its myriad faces and languages all competing with the sound of the market traders shouting back at you, selling they're bits and bobs, rubbing they're hands together to get the warmth back in, sipping hot steaming cups of tea. Ridley Road market, and by extension, Dalston itself, is a great place; busy, colourful, unpretentious, noisy, real and alive. If you can see beyond its scruffiness, you might well find yourself falling hopelessly in love with the place.
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