Edgware Road pubs

NW8 is mostly notorious for enormous houses wallowing in acres of garden behind big brick walls. Church Street, however, is a different sort of world altogether. Turning off Edgware Road, Church Street seems to sprawl eastwards in a mindblowing array of extremely nasty council blocks, a concrete lowrise hellhole mostly forgotten by the rest of the world. I've walked down here before on a Friday night and found it deserted, all the shops shut and the pubs closed, much like I had stumbled into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. The Saturday market, however , transforms a grim stretch of architectural atheism into a little strip of magic, displaying all the quintessential paradoxes that make London so wonderful. Cafes of all varieties throw open their doors, the smell of food fills the vicinity, stalls sell everything from dodgy middle-eastern batteries through to antiques and plants. People from every walk of life and seemingly all nationalities crowd round the stalls, chattering in all number of languages and dialects. A gruesome area flowers, and becomes beautiful. The Traders Inn, unfortunately, does not posses quite as broad a cosmopolitan mix as the crossroads it dominates, but it still makes a good effort to be more inclusive than many of the pubs in its neighbourhood. A large, early Victorian building tiled outside in a less than charming brown, it has generous windows and minimal decor, high celings and a large bar area, outside tables and psychedelic seat covers that clashing brutally with the red walls. It has about it a sense of spacious ease and general unhurriedness, compeletely at odds with the frantic bustle of the market outside. A preternaturally impressive random selection from the jukebox brought the greatest pop music of the twentieth century into the mix (before someone ruined it by actually paying to put some music on, and inevitably chose some hideous chugging rock miscegnation from the 80s) and a relaxed patter of conversation flowed across the bar. I don't believe it served proper food, but toasties were on offer, and I saw one fellow demand that the barman put his pint of lager in the fridge while he took his dog for a walk, which is the sort of local service I respect. In terms of entertainment, apart from the Preternatural Jukebox it had a slot machine and 14" TV on a shelf that only showed BBC2, but the litany of C20 musical greats was so astonishing, coupled with the glorious view of the world about its business outside, that I didn't need any more. I can't imagine anyone taking a trip out to this area unless they need to pick up 20 boxes of Slovakian hair trimmers at a bargain rate, but the Traders Inn is just perfect for a long slow Saturday with nothing in mind but letting the world drift by.

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