From old pubs to Michelin Star restaurants: How Bethnal Green is bridging the gap between old and new

The jagged harmonies of the new Bethnal Green sing out as ROAM emerges from the tube station. Two men with dyed red hair are crossing the street within a stride’s length of each other — one of them is a punk, the other a haji.

The history of the area is anchored by the Stairway to Heaven memorial, which remembers 173 local people who were crushed to death in the underground air-raid shelter in 1943.

One face of the present is represented by the nearby Three Colts Tavern. Portraits on the pub wall include Karl Marx, although the working class is conspicuously absent from the bar, where only natural wines, craft beers and cocktails are served.

More established features of Bethnal Green are visible in the station-adjacent Salmon & Ball pub, where the bar is festooned with Union Jacks (recently, they were flags of St George), all the beers come from major breweries, and West Ham football shirts are worn in all weathers.

In November, Proposition Studios opened 53 studios for “artists and creative practitioners” within minutes of the station.

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Currently, the studio building is home to a “Perpetual Zone” exploring “Dance as Ecological Reciprocity”. I suspect there has not been much customer overlap with the Salmon & Ball.

Bethnal Green Road remains busy, raucous and gaudy, with footpaths fringed by a scrappy street market. Highlights include the legendary Italian cafe E Pellici (established 1900, and once a haunt of the Krays).

The staff at E Pellici seem to know everyone on the street, and serve the largest full English breakfasts I have ever seen. The food is almost too much for the plates and plates are nearly too big for the tables.

Further down the road is S & R Kelly & Sons, which boast of selling jellied eels and pie and mash since 1915. Just as the Three Colts only accepts cards, E Pellici and S & R Kelly only take cash.

Time is prone to collapse in Bethnal Green. A dramatic sandwich board outside the onetime Kray family-frequented Marquis of Cornwallis pub convincingly advertises a (fictitious) night of boxing headlined by Ronnie and Reggie Kray and featuring their older brother Charlie Kray on the undercard.

Although S & R Kelly & Sons offers an attractively priced pie meal — pie and mash followed by apple pie with a mug of tea, for about $20 — I choose my Bethnal Green pie from the pie menu of the Camel pub, where everybody but me looks like an arts student.

The Camel’s pies are unmistakably bourgeois, with thin pastry, lean meats and vegetarian and vegan options, but the Moo Blue (British beef steak and ale with Long Clawson Stilton cheese) is a pieman’s delight.

There are, of course, no pies on the tasting menu at the Michelin-starred Da Terra, which shares the former Bethnal Green Town Hall building with the luxury Town Hall Hotel.

The Da Terra full menu costs about $520 per head, excluding wine, and might include chalk-stream trout and quail. A similar, shorter menu is available for about $370, while a three-course set lunch can be had for only about $220.

Prior to its entry into the hospitality industry, the timber-panelled interior of the Town Hall building enjoyed an extensive movie career.

It played Hatchet Harry’s office in Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, and a tailor’s shop in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. Its further credits include the lesser known 1999 movie The Criminal and the 2006 thriller Breaking And Entering.

The Kray Twins biopic, Legend, featuring Tom Hardy as both Krays, was also filmed around Bethnal Green in 2015 — because, despite half a century of demographic change, much of the suburb still looks the same as it did 60 years ago.

No matter how many landscape artists and environmentalist interpretive dancers move to the suburb, Bethnal Green remains a toff guy’s dream of Mobland.