please empty your brain below
Less High Streety High Streets than Stratford?
Point taken, but I can think of a few...Shoreditch's is hardly a run-of-the-mill one now.
I don't know them so well, but I have a vague feeling the High Streets of Lambeth and Battersea are not what one might expect of a place of that name...and that of Romford is rather well, grim, too.
But the prize (at least of places close to London) must surely go to Leigh-on-Sea, whose High Street (as opposed to Broadway, up on top of the cliffs, which is more like a conventional High Street, as well as one of the nicest shopping and eating and drinking streets in Essex) is v. narrow, windswept, immediately adjacent to a railway line on one side, and filled with a marina and cockle sheds and other fishmongery sheds on the other side, before you get to a bit with a few pubs and outdoor seafront beer gardens, and a a restaurant, and a gallery or two, and the old railway station now used as a sea scout hut.
Definitely not a high street chain, a department store in sight...and I think precisely one shop (selling rock and stuff like that, tourist season only). Don't think you could buy a Mars bar, and if you wanted a hair cut, you'd have to do it yourself.
A great stone plaque reading "waste not want not" over the old well that supplied the town with water, too.
Erm, sorry, I appear to have got carried away. Back to E15
http://cinematreasures.org/theat.../theater/12982/
A South Londoner now, I knew the Whitechapel and Mile End area well in the past. It was always a strange mixture of buildings and people and, as you describe it now , the mix is still there and still changing.
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