After dark, the arches come alive, by Priya Lockhart
An original contemporary magazine article.
By day, the seven railway arches on Wharf Street are exactly what you would expect: a tyre fitter, a locksmith, four shuttered units and a gym that smells faintly of rubber. Trains rumble overhead every four minutes. Nobody lingers.
Come back at six o’clock on a Friday, though, and you will not recognise the place. The shutters are up, strings of bulbs swing between the brick piers, and the first coils of smoke are rising from forty food stalls packed into a space not much longer than a football pitch. By seven, the queue for dumplings stretches past the locksmith’s door.
The smell reaches you first. Charcoal, cumin, frying garlic and something sweet and burnt that turns out to be sugar caramelising on a blowtorched custard tart. Then comes the noise: the hiss of oil, the clatter of metal spatulas, a reggae bass line from one arch colliding with Cantonese pop from the next, and every few minutes the iron roar of a train that makes the bulbs shiver while nobody even looks up.
I began, on the advice of three separate strangers, at Mama Adjoa’s, where Kwesi Ugwu ladles jollof rice from a pan the size of a cartwheel. It is smoky, fiery and deeply comforting, and at £6 a portion it is the best value in the city. Next door, two sisters from Sichuan fold dumplings so quickly their hands blur, pinching each one into twelve perfect pleats. I ate eight. I would have eaten eight more.
There is room for the strange as well as the familiar. One stall sells nothing but toasted sandwiches filled with cheese from a single farm in Lancashire; another offers Filipino ube ice cream, a startling violet that looks as though it should glow in the dark. A teenager behind a tiny counter is selling lemonade flavoured with rosemary, and selling out.
The market was set up three years ago by Hannah Boateng, a former chef who was tired of seeing young cooks priced out of restaurant leases. Stallholders pay £40 a night, and almost half of them had never sold food in public before. ‘This is where people take their first risk,’ she says, shouting over a passing freight train. ‘If it works here, it can work anywhere.’
It is working. Around 3,000 people now come through on a typical Friday, and four former stallholders have gone on to open restaurants of their own.
I left at ten, sticky-fingered, with chilli on my sleeve and a paper bag of warm doughnuts I had promised myself I would save for breakfast. They did not make it to the end of the street. Behind me, another train thundered across the arches, and beneath it the whole place glowed like a lantern.
The Friday night market under the Wharf Street railway arches is described as a feast for the senses. How does the writer try to show this?
You should comment on:
You must refer to the text to support your comments, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.