Essay on Salaam Brick Lane

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Academic essay on Salaam Brick Lane London. To most people, including myself, it's a city of hopes and dreams. A place where you will want to settle down, surrounded by the lights of a city that never goes to sleep. A place, where a multitude of cultures meet. However, behind the pretty façade of the West End, hides a dark part of London, often overlooked by visitors, residents and politicians alike. A place, that houses the poor community of London. A place, that for a year housed writer and journalist, Tarquin Hall, as well. East-end London. Tarquin Hall, being an extensive traveller of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, returned to London after ten years of living abroad. Having failed to make his fortune, Hall returned to London, broke. Expecting to purchase a residence in the western part of London, Hall was forced to look for housing elsewhere, due to the highly increased estate pricing. Now looking to settle down in the suburbs, he received this demoralizing message from an estate agent: “You won't get a shoebox in Dagenham on your budget, sir,”. Unable to find affordable property in the western part of London, Hall was now forced to set his eyes on the East-end, an area mostly unknown to him. Having grown up an upper-middle class citizen, living in Barnes in the south-western part of London, unknowing of the conditions under which the residents of East London lived, Hall was astonished by the setting, to the point that he wrote a book about it – Salaam Brick Lane. Salaam Brick Lane is a tale of Hall's personal experiences during his time living in the East-end, and thus, the “I” in Salaam Brick Lane, is most likely the author himself. Throughout the story, he compares the current East London a subject, that the average West Londoner would never as much as consider to be similar to any part London, that they know; The 20th century London. The

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