A Local’s Guide to Redchurch Street, Shoreditch
The most interesting 400 metres in East London, and how to spend a day on it
If you only have time for one street in Shoreditch, make it this one. Redchurch Street is where the area’s past as a furniture-making slum, its 1990s reinvention and its present life as a design quarter all sit on top of one another, often in the same building.
There is a particular hour on Redchurch Street that I look out for. It is mid-morning on a weekday, before the lunch crowd arrives and after the delivery vans have cleared off.
The light comes low along the old brick frontages, a barista at Allpress is wedging the door open with a chair, and a couple of the boutiques are still rolling up their shutters. For about twenty minutes the street belongs to the people who actually work on it.
That is when you understand what Redchurch Street really is: not a shopping destination that happens to be in Shoreditch, but a working stretch of East London that has been polished, argued over and rebuilt more times than almost any road in the city.
I have been walking this street for years, watching shops open, close and reopen under new names, and I still think it rewards a slow afternoon more than almost anywhere else in the area.
It runs roughly east to west, linking Shoreditch High Street at one end to the bottom of Brick Lane at the other, which means you can fall onto it from two of the busiest corners in East London and immediately feel the volume drop. The chains thin out. The shopfronts get smaller and odder. The coffee gets better and more expensive. And if you pay attention to the buildings rather than the window displays, the whole strange history of this corner of London is written into the brickwork.
This is a guide to spending real time here: what to see, where to eat, which shops are worth your money, and the quieter corners most visitors stride straight past. I have left out the places I would not send a friend to, and I have tried to be honest about the fact that this is an expensive street that wears its money lightly. Take it as a recommendation from someone who knows the area, rather than a list scraped off a map.
The Story of Redchurch Street
Redchurch Street was not always called that. On early nineteenth-century maps it appears as Church Street, a name it kept until the Victorians tidied up London’s endlessly duplicated street names. It sat on the western edge of an area known as the Old Nichol, a dense grid of courts and alleys straddling the boundary between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. That parish line survives today in the name of Boundary Street, which crosses Redchurch at its western end.
For most of its life this was a furniture street. East London was the centre of the British furniture trade, and the streets around here were packed with cabinetmakers, chairmakers and woodcutters working out of cramped workshops, often family operations turning out parts for the larger firms. A few buildings remember this even now. Walk to the eastern stretch near Brick Lane and look up at numbers 113 to 115: these are three-storey weavers’ houses dating from around 1735, with the tall upper windows that once let light into the workrooms. They are some of the oldest survivors on the street, and easy to miss if you are looking at shop windows instead of rooflines.
The Old Nichol itself became infamous. By the 1880s it was one of the poorest and most overcrowded districts in the capital, home to several thousand people living in conditions that shocked even hardened Victorian reformers. Charles Booth’s famous poverty map shaded these streets in the darkest colours, and the area was fixed in the public imagination by Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel A Child of the Jago, which used a thinly disguised version of the Nichol as its setting. Morrison was encouraged to write it by the local vicar, and although residents later complained that he had exaggerated the violence and squalor, the book was a bestseller and helped seal the area’s fate.
What happened next is genuinely important to London’s history. Under the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, the newly formed London County Council was given the power to clear slums, and the Old Nichol was one of the first it demolished. In its place, between 1893 and 1900, the LCC built the Boundary Estate, widely regarded as the first council estate in London and arguably the world.
It was designed by a young team under the architect Owen Fleming, who arranged twenty blocks of red-brick, Arts and Crafts-influenced flats around a central raised garden. That garden, Arnold Circus, was built up on rubble from the demolished slum and topped with a bandstand. It sits a couple of minutes north of Redchurch Street and remains one of the most quietly moving places in East London, once you know what you are standing on.
So Redchurch Street spent the twentieth century as a slightly forgotten working road on the edge of all this: warehouses, light industry, the slow decline of the furniture trade. By the time the 1990s arrived, much of Shoreditch had emptied out, and that emptiness turned out to be the making of it. Artists and small creative businesses moved into the cheap, high-ceilinged former workshops and warehouses, drawn by the space and the rents. Studios, galleries and bars followed.
The fashion and design names came later, once the area had a reputation, and they are the layer most visitors see first today. But the bones underneath are industrial, and the best of the modern street still works with those bones rather than against them.
Why Redchurch Street Defines Modern Shoreditch
Shoreditch is a slippery word. People use it to mean everything from the glass towers near Old Street roundabout to the curry houses of Brick Lane, and the name has been borrowed by so much marketing that it can feel like it means nothing at all. Redchurch Street is where it still means something specific. If you want to understand what the area actually became, rather than what an estate agent says it is, this is the street to read.
It does the thing Shoreditch is supposed to do, which is mix independent culture with serious money and somehow keep both honest. On a single short walk you pass a Michelin-starred restaurant, a homeware shop selling enamel mugs and dustpans, a candle boutique, a barber that helped invent the modern beard, a Taiwanese bun shop and a fresh pasta counter run by Italians who will teach you to make ravioli. None of it feels like a shopping centre.
The independents have not been entirely pushed out by the brands, and the brands that have moved in tend to be the kind that care about how a shopfront looks. The result is a street that reads as curated without quite tipping into theme park.
It also matters because it is walkable and legible in a way the rest of Shoreditch often is not. The area can be disorientating, all one-way systems and railway viaducts and identical-looking corners. Redchurch Street is a clear line you can follow from one landmark to another, picking up the side streets as you go. For a first-time visitor, it is the single best introduction to the neighbourhood. For a Londoner, it is a reliable Saturday: coffee, a browse, lunch, a wander into Brick Lane, and home before the evening crowds make the pavements impossible.
The Best Shops on Redchurch Street
This is, above all, a shopping street, and a particular kind of one. Do not come expecting bargains. Come expecting things made well, displayed beautifully and priced accordingly. The pleasure here is as much in the browsing as the buying, and several of these shops are worth visiting purely as small pieces of design in their own right.
Labour and Wait
If you visit one shop, make it Labour and Wait at number 85, on the corner near the Brick Lane end. It lives in a former Truman brewery pub called The Dolphin, a handsome late-Georgian building still wrapped in its original green-tiled frontage, which makes it one of the most recognisable shops on the street.
Inside it is a temple to functional, unfussy household goods: enamelware, kitchen tools, brushes, stationery, gardening kit, classic workwear and the sort of objects your grandparents owned and never needed to replace. The founders came from menswear design and have spent more than two decades sourcing everyday classics from specialist makers around the world. It is the spiritual heart of the street, in my opinion, because it sells the idea that ordinary things are worth doing properly. You can lose half an hour in here and walk out with a dustpan you are oddly proud of.
A.P.C., Sunspel and Folk
The fashion on Redchurch Street leans towards quiet quality rather than logos. A.P.C., the French label known for its raw denim and stripped-back Parisian minimalism, has a shop towards the Shoreditch High Street end. Sunspel, the British brand that has been making fine cotton T-shirts and underwear since the nineteenth century, is the place for timeless, beautifully cut basics that cost more than the high street and last a great deal longer. Folk, at number 31, is one of the best independent British menswear labels going, with a womenswear line too, and a relaxed, considered house style that suits the street perfectly. None of these will give you a cheap thrill. All of them reward a slow look.
Free People, Reformation and the bigger names
Towards the western end you will find slightly larger names: Free People for boho-leaning womenswear, and Reformation for its much-loved, sustainability-minded dresses. Their arrival is part of the street’s evolution, and locals have mixed feelings about it. I take a pragmatic view. They draw footfall, they have kept their shopfronts in keeping with the street, and they sit alongside the independents rather than replacing them. If you want the full picture of how Redchurch Street has changed, the contrast between these and a place like Labour and Wait tells the whole story in a hundred metres.
Aesop, Le Labo and Earl of East
Redchurch Street is unusually good for scent and skincare. Aesop has one of its characteristically restrained, almost architectural shops here, all dark wood and amber bottles. Le Labo, the New York fragrance house, will blend and label a personal scent for you on the spot. And Earl of East, a homegrown London favourite, is the one I send people to for candles and home fragrance: their soy candles and bathing products feel like the street distilled into something you can take home. Even if you buy nothing, these three are a lesson in how to make a small retail space feel like an experience.
Murdock London
At number 46 sits Murdock London, a traditional barber reinvented for the modern Shoreditch man. This stretch of the street had a genuine claim to being the birthplace of the contemporary beard a decade or so ago, and Murdock was at the centre of it. Even if you are not in the market for a hot-towel shave, it is part of the texture of the street and a reminder that grooming here is treated as seriously as fashion.
The Best Cafes on Redchurch Street
Coffee is close to a competitive sport on Redchurch Street, and the rivalry between the two main contenders is half the fun. They face each other across the road like duellists, and locals are quietly loyal to one or the other.
Allpress Espresso
My pick is Allpress, at number 58 on the corner with Club Row. This is the London home of the New Zealand roaster, and the Redchurch Street site is also a working roastery, so you can watch beans being roasted while you drink. The flat whites are the thing here: Kiwi-style, properly extracted, no fuss and no syrupy nonsense. It is on the small side, with a few coveted seats outside that are perfect for watching the street go about its business. Hours run roughly from eight in the morning until late afternoon, so it is a daytime spot rather than an evening one. If you only have time for one coffee on the street, have it here.
Jolene
Directly opposite, on the other corner of Club Row, is Jolene, a small bakery and cafe with coral-painted walls and a takeaway window that does a roaring trade. The baking is the draw: the sourdough and pastries are made fresh and genuinely rival the better dedicated bakeries in London, which is no small claim around here. The sandwiches are excellent too. It is tiny, so expect to queue and to take your haul elsewhere, perhaps up to Arnold Circus to eat on a bench. Between Allpress and Jolene you have the whole Shoreditch coffee-and-pastry argument in two shopfronts, and honestly the right answer is to visit both.
A note on working from here
If you are after somewhere to open a laptop for a couple of hours, Redchurch Street itself is not really built for it. The cafes here are small and busy and not especially laptop-friendly. For a proper working session you are better off heading a few minutes west to the larger roastery cafes around Shoreditch and Old Street, where there is room to settle in. Come to Redchurch for the quality of the cup, not the square footage.
Where to Eat on Redchurch Street
For such a short street, Redchurch punches absurdly above its weight on food. You can eat a Michelin-starred dinner, a bowl of Taiwanese beef noodles, a plate of hand-rolled pasta and a proper Sunday roast within a few doors of one another. Here is how I would think about it depending on the occasion.
Brat (special occasions)
The headline act is Brat, the Basque-inspired restaurant from chef Tomos Parry, on the first floor at number 4 in the old Tea Building at the Shoreditch High Street end. It opened in 2018 and won a Michelin star with cooking built around an open fire and a wood-fired oven.
The whole turbot is the signature, charred and basted at the grill, but everything that comes off the fire carries that smoke, from the sourdough with burnt butter to the seasonal vegetables. It is rustic and refined at once, the dining room is warm and full of life, and it is one of the genuinely great restaurants in London right now. Book well ahead. If you cannot get in, the team also runs a more relaxed offshoot under the railway arches over in London Fields.
Cecconi’s Shoreditch (date nights and long lunches)
At numbers 58 to 60, on the ground floor of the Redchurch Townhouse hotel, Cecconi’s is Soho House’s northern Italian restaurant, a more relaxed cousin of the Mayfair original. Mosaic floors, sage-toned furnishings and a sweeping bar make it a handsome room, and the concertina windows fold right back in summer so the dining room spills onto the street. It is an all-day spot: come for breakfast and pancakes, a long lunch of cicchetti and pasta, or an aperitivo at the bar before dinner. It is not cheap, but it is reliably good and one of the most pleasant places on the street to sit for a couple of hours.
BAO Shoreditch and Burro e Salvia (something special, less formal)
At number 53, BAO Shoreditch takes its cue from the beef noodle shops of Taiwan, with noodles made in-house from imported Taiwanese flour, a rotating selection of those famous fluffy bao buns, and shaved-ice desserts to finish. It is one of the most enjoyable mid-range meals in the area. A few doors along at number 52, Burro e Salvia is a fresh pasta shop and small restaurant run by Italians who roll their ravioli by hand, sell it to take away, and will even teach you to make your own at a pasta class. For a low-key lunch with genuine character, these two are hard to beat.
Smoking Goat, The Owl & Pussycat and The Boundary
At the western end, sharing the Tea Building footprint, Smoking Goat serves bold Thai barbecue across long shared tables and is a brilliant, noisy place to eat with a group. For something more traditional, The Owl & Pussycat at number 34 is the street’s proper pub, all chunky wood and exposed brick, with a beer garden and a welcome for dogs. And at the corner of Boundary Street stands The Boundary, the converted Victorian warehouse hotel whose ground-floor Bar & Brasserie does an excellent Sunday roast, and whose rooftop bar and glass Orangery restaurant offer one of the best views across Shoreditch and the City. The rooftop is the place for a celebratory drink at golden hour, weather permitting.
The Quieter Corners Most Visitors Walk Past
The mistake most people make on Redchurch Street is to walk it in a straight line and never turn off it. The street is really a spine, and the best discoveries are down the ribs: the little roads running north and south that the crowds rarely bother with.
Start with Club Row, which crosses Redchurch by the Allpress and Jolene corners and leads north towards the Boundary Estate. It is one of the surviving Old Nichol street names, and it carries a heavy history: this was once the site of a notorious live-animal and bird market. Today it is a calm, low-key stretch that most people overlook entirely.
Then there are Chance Street and Whitby Street, the narrow turnings towards the eastern end. This is where the street art gets denser and stranger, away from the main thoroughfare. The work changes constantly, painted over and renewed, so no two visits are the same. Walk slowly and look up: the best pieces are often above head height, on the flanks of buildings and the shutters of yards.
The real reward, though, is to keep going north to Arnold Circus. Two minutes from the noise of Redchurch Street, you arrive at a raised circular garden with a bandstand at its centre, ringed by the elegant red-brick blocks of the Boundary Estate.
On a Sunday you will see residents crossing the circus with armfuls of flowers from nearby Columbia Road, alongside parents with pushchairs and a few coffee obsessives. It is a complete change of register from the shopping street below, and once you know it was built on the rubble of London’s most notorious slum, it becomes one of the most quietly powerful places in the city. Bring a Jolene pastry and sit on a bench for ten minutes. This is the corner I take people to when I want them to understand the area properly.
Finally, look out for the courtyards and yards tucked behind the street frontages, often half-hidden behind gates and signage. Ebor Street, running along the back of the Tea Building, is worth a detour for its scale and its murals. These are the spaces that remember the street’s industrial life, and they are where Redchurch Street still feels like a working corner of East London rather than a showroom.
Street Art and the Creative Pulse
You cannot talk about this part of Shoreditch without talking about the walls. Street art is woven into the fabric here, a direct inheritance from the 1990s creative wave that first colonised the empty warehouses. Redchurch Street and its side turnings have long been an open-air gallery, with work appearing from internationally known names alongside anonymous paste-ups that might last a week.
Over the years the surrounding streets have carried pieces by artists such as Ben Eine, known for his bold painted alphabets, and the muralists who treat the larger gable ends as canvases. The defining feature is impermanence: the art is constantly repainted, weathered and replaced, which is exactly the point. Unlike the history fixed in the brickwork, the painted layer is alive and never twice the same. If you are interested in it, the best approach is simply to wander the side streets with your eyes up, then drift north and east towards Brick Lane and the streets around it, where the density increases.
It is worth remembering that this is not decoration applied for tourists. The creative community is still here, in studios, galleries and workspaces threaded through the area, even as rents have risen. The art on the walls is the visible edge of something deeper, and it is the reason the street still feels like it belongs to makers as much as to shoppers.
The Perfect Redchurch Street Walking Route
Here is the route I would walk with a visitor who has half a day and wants the full experience: history, shopping, coffee, art and a proper meal, ending on a high. It runs west to east, roughly following the street from Shoreditch High Street towards Brick Lane, with a loop north to Arnold Circus in the middle. Allow three to four hours if you stop properly, or stretch it across a whole lazy day.
What to Do Nearby
Redchurch Street is the centre of a much larger afternoon. It connects directly to some of the best-known corners of East London, and part of its appeal is how easily it spills into them. Here is where to go next.
Brick Lane
The eastern end of Redchurch Street drops you near the top of Brick Lane, the long, famous spine of the area, known for its curry houses, vintage warehouses, bagel shops open into the small hours, and a huge weekend market in and around the Old Truman Brewery. It is louder and scruffier than Redchurch and all the better for it. If Redchurch is the polished version of Shoreditch, Brick Lane is the raw material.
Spitalfields
A short walk south brings you to Spitalfields and its covered market, a good all-weather option with a mix of independent stalls, design and food, surrounded by some of the finest Georgian streets in London. Combine it with Redchurch Street for a day that runs from eighteenth-century silk-weavers’ houses to twenty-first-century fashion in the space of fifteen minutes’ walking.
Columbia Road
If you are here on a Sunday, Columbia Road Flower Market is unmissable, a few minutes north of Arnold Circus. The narrow street fills with flower stalls and the little independent shops behind them open up. Go early to beat the crush, or late for the end-of-day bargains as traders clear their stock. It pairs naturally with a morning on Redchurch and a coffee in between.
Bethnal Green and Shoreditch High Street
North and east, Bethnal Green offers a more residential, less polished slice of East London, with good pubs and the excellent Museum of Childhood nearby. West, Shoreditch High Street and the streets around it give you the bigger bars, the larger restaurants and the late-night side of the area. Redchurch Street sits in the calm centre of all of it, which is exactly why it makes such a good base for exploring.
Local Tips
A few things worth knowing before you go, gathered from too many visits to count:
The Final Verdict
Redchurch Street is the rare London street that makes sense of its surroundings rather than just sitting in them. It tells you, in a few hundred metres, how this corner of the East End went from one of the poorest slums in the country to the world’s first council estate to a derelict warehouse district to whatever you want to call it now: a design quarter, a food destination, a very expensive village high street. All of those layers are still visible if you know where to look, and most of them are visible from the same pavement.
Is it worth visiting? Without question, and not just for the obvious reasons. Yes, the shopping is excellent and the food is some of the best in London. But what keeps me coming back is the feeling that the street is still arguing with itself, still working out what it wants to be, with the weavers’ houses and the Michelin star and the candle shop and the old pub-turned-homeware-temple all making their case at once. Most polished streets have finished becoming themselves. This one has not, and probably never will.
Here is the thing only a local really notices. Stand outside Labour and Wait, in the green-tiled shell of a pub that poured pints for furniture makers a century ago, and look across at a shop selling sixty-pound candles. Two minutes north, on a garden raised on the bones of a demolished slum, someone is eating a flat white on a bench. None of it should sit together, and yet it does, every single day, without anyone finding it strange. That, more than any single shop or restaurant, is why Redchurch Street remains one of the most interesting streets in London. Go on a quiet morning, walk it slowly, and let it tell you the whole story.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Redchurch Street?
Redchurch Street runs through the heart of Shoreditch in East London, postcode E2 and E1, connecting Shoreditch High Street at its western end to the bottom of Brick Lane at its eastern end. The nearest station is Shoreditch High Street on the Overground, a one or two-minute walk away, with Liverpool Street a short distance further.
What is Redchurch Street famous for?
Redchurch Street is famous for being one of Shoreditch’s leading design and shopping streets, lined with independent fashion, homeware and fragrance boutiques, excellent coffee, and high-profile restaurants including the Michelin-starred Brat. It is also known for its industrial history and its links to the Old Nichol slum and the neighbouring Boundary Estate, the first council estate in London.
Is Redchurch Street worth visiting?
Yes. Redchurch Street is one of the best introductions to Shoreditch and East London, combining genuine history, distinctive independent shops, strong coffee and some of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants in a short, walkable stretch. It rewards a slow visit and connects easily to Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Columbia Road and Arnold Circus.
What are the best shops on Redchurch Street?
Standout shops include Labour and Wait for functional homeware in a former tiled pub, Folk, Sunspel and A.P.C. for understated fashion, Aesop and Le Labo for skincare and fragrance, and Earl of East for candles and home scent. Most are independent or design-led, and several are worth visiting for the shopfront alone.
What can you do on Redchurch Street?
You can shop independent fashion and design boutiques, drink some of London’s best coffee at Allpress or Jolene, eat everything from Taiwanese buns to a Michelin-starred dinner, hunt for street art on the side turnings, and explore the history of the Boundary Estate and Arnold Circus a couple of minutes to the north.
Why is Redchurch Street so popular?
Its popularity comes from a rare mix: a high concentration of quality independent shops and restaurants, a walkable and legible layout in an otherwise confusing area, a strong creative and street-art heritage, and a visible history that runs from Georgian weavers’ houses to the world’s first council estate. It captures what people mean by Shoreditch better than anywhere else.
What is near Redchurch Street?
Redchurch Street sits within a few minutes’ walk of Brick Lane, Spitalfields Market, the Sunday flower market on Columbia Road, the Boundary Estate and Arnold Circus, and the bars and restaurants of Shoreditch High Street. Bethnal Green lies a little further north and east.
How long should you spend on Redchurch Street?
Allow at least two to three hours to do the street justice, browsing the shops, stopping for coffee and looking at the architecture. With lunch and a loop north to Arnold Circus, plus a wander into Brick Lane or Columbia Road, it easily fills a half day or a relaxed full day.
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