Hotspot in waiting: Bethnal Green set to rival Shoreditch with trendy bars and new homes in the Victorian chest hospital
With its bantering stallholders loudly extolling the virtues of their fruit and veg and excitable teenage girls sifting through piles of knock-off designer bags, Roman Road Market is not a place to go to nurse a hangover on a Saturday morning.
It might be one of the last surviving pockets of authentic East End London, resisting the gentrification that has embraced much of Tower Hamlets, but Bethnal Green’s resistance is weakening, wooed by a series of major new developments and fashionable small conversions that are warming it up for a place in the league table of hotspots.
You have only to look at the location, three miles north-east of Charing Cross, and its proximity to Shoreditch and Brick Lane, to know that no matter how shabby the shopping in Bethnal Green Road, regardless of how gritty and untrendy its streets, where you’ll search in vain for a chain coffee shop or artisanal bakery, it is still a place that is ready to rock.
Despite the damage done by the Blitz and grim social housing that later emerged, keen renovators can still find outstanding period houses, while major housebuilders are already on to the opportunities provided by abandoned Victorian institutes and industrial wastelands.
TRENDY BARS ARE IN PLACE
Jenna Buck, head of sales at EastHaus estate agents admits it has some way to go. “But there are pockets where you are getting some really nice independent restaurants and bars coming in, like in the Paradise Row railway arches and on Old Bethnal Green Road, which are making a real difference to the area.”
Plans to reboot the former London Chest Hospital and its four acres of grounds beside Victoria Park, which closed in 2015 after 160 years’ service, are due to be decided by Tower Hamlets council later this year.
The site is owned by housebuilder Crest Nicholson and housing association Circle Housing, who want to enlarge the original Victorian hospital and convert it into 300 flats, of which 70 will be affordable, and a new nursery.
Its fine iron balconies will be preserved and its grounds will be landscaped, though thousands have signed a petition objecting to plans to remove an ancient mulberry tree thought to be 400 years old. If planners consent, work is expected to start this year.
Telford Homes has splashed out a reported £30 million on the former London Electricity Board HQ in Cambridge Heath Road.
The site is small at just under an acre, but it’s near Bethnal Green Tube. The company is working on plans for new flats and shops.
Jon Di-Stefano, chief executive of Telford Homes has said work on the £95 million development could start this year.
Final touches are being made to Macpherson Apartments, 15 flats overlooking Paradise Gardens, a small, leafy open space just off Cambridge Heath Road.
Prices start at £495,000 for a one-bedroom flat, with London Help to Buy available, and £699,000 for a two- bedroom flat.
The homes will be completed by next month and a new community café and church are part of the deal.
WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO BUY?
Bethnal Green already has a splendidly mixed existing housing stock. Old warehouses and workshops have been converted into excellent houses and flats and the prices, though steep, pale in comparison to those in Hoxton or Shoreditch.
The Modern House is selling a beautifully presented ex-furniture workshop, now a three-bedroom house, in Gibraltar Walk for £1,995,000.
A legacy of the area’s history as a centre for silk weavers, there are also Georgian townhouses and workers’ cottages you would pay a fortune for in Islington.
They’re not exactly being given away in Bethnal Green but again, they are far cheaper than they would be in N1.
In Victoria Square, in one of the area’s well-built red-brick Thirties mansion blocks, a roomy second-floor flat is for sale with Victorstone Property Consultants for £575,000.
Or if you want to be in the thick of things, Marsh & Parsons has a purpose-built two-bedroom flat above shops in Bethnal Green Road for £485,000.