East End Food Tour & Spitalfields Market
At 10 am, we departed for a food-centric tour of the East End. The weather was colder today, so most of the group bundled up in our outerwear.
We split up into two groups to visit multiple places in the Brick Lane / Spitalfields market area to sample different kinds of food made by locals.
We tried fish and chips with mushy peas, madelines, a Jewish-style beigel with beef, a sampling of curry dishes from a Brick Lane curry shop, and a sampling of cheeses from a Spitalfields cheese shop.
Our guide, Niall, was very charismatic and funny! He led us through Brick Lane to different eateries, and past local landmarks, like the Truman Brewery.
Brick Lane definitely has a personality! It’s bursting at the seams with street art and indie fashion shops.
We had some free time to check out Spitalfields market, and then the group met back up to go to the Churchill War Rooms.
Churchill War Rooms
After a brief wait outside the entrance, we went in to the Churchill War Rooms about 3:30 pm.
It was very interesting how they had preserved the rooms with the items that would have been used at the time, complete with re-creations of the products the people working in the bunker would have used.
I liked the attention to detail shown in this museum. For instance, there is yarn and supplies to mark out paths on the maps, not just the maps themselves.
Also, I had no idea that the only “working” bathroom in the complex was actually a top-secret telephone scrambler system, encoding the voice communications between Winston Churchill and the US president with specially designed encryption, called SIGSALY.
This was my wow moment of the day. Information security technology is right in my wheelhouse.
Leake Street Tunnel
We were free that evening, so I headed across the bridge to check out more street art on Leake Street, also known as Banksy Tunnel. Graffiti is legal there.
Despite being a tunnel street, it was not isolated or scary. There were plenty of people there checking out the art during the day and some graffiti artists were there working as well. I walked the length of the tunnel and back. There is spray paint covering the most of the walls and even the ceiling!
Dinner and The Play That Goes Wrong
Then I headed over to The Duchess Theatre, stopping for pizza at Franco Manca next door.
I saw the hilarious The Play That Goes Wrong.
It’s a play within a play, the premise of which is a debut performance of a murder mystery play, but everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, starting small and ramping up to a crescendo. I was laughing so hard!
Let’s just say, they really brought down the house!
Total steps: 16,708
Staycation No More 