Exploring far East London

One of our New Year's resolutions we made this year was to spend more time visiting parts of London we haven't yet been to. We've been here for a year and a half, and there is still so much of London and the surrounding region that we haven't seen. Though to be fair, there's still lots of Auckland I haven't seen and I've lived there my whole life.

So our first excursion a couple of weekends ago, was out to East London and the Olympic stadium which is still in the process of being built. We have been wanting to go out that way for a while, but it's a long train trip so we kept putting it off!

It took over an hour to get to Hackney from our house. We wanted to start our walk in Hackney as it has some great street art, plus some Kiwi cafe's I've heard good things about, and a couple of markets.

Our first stop was The Long White Cloud cafe, where we had some great coffee, Vege Frittata and Banana bread. There's no shortage of good Kiwi and Aussie cafe's in London, but the downside is that the majority are out East, so it's a bit far for us to go just for a coffee.

After breakfast we headed over to Broadway market, which immediately made us wish we hadn't just eaten. It was full of so many amazing foods, plus heaps of vintage clothing and jewellery. East London is extremely popular with hipsters, and they all seemed to be all in one place. The market was just full of them. For those of you who are not up to speed on hipsters, here's a good explanation: Hipster's Explained

East London is full of awesome street art, there's a street art tour you can do, but you can pretty much just wander round the streets and do your own tour anyway. They are literally tons of examples everywhere.

The food at Broadway Market 

The walk from Hackney to the Olympic Stadium took about an hour. We wandered down the canals and past all the houseboats. It was a lovely sunny day and there were lots of people out and about.

We wanted to visit the Olympic Stadium before it started getting too crazy with all the crowds coming into London for the Olympics. Once the Olympics start in a few months, there is no way I'm going near East London.

First glimpse of the stadium

I really don't understand the concept behind the ugly thing. It's called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, and it looks really ugly up close. It's going to be an observation platform from which to view the stadium, but it just looks like a big mish mash of nothing.

Right next to the Olympic Stadium there is another tiny Kiwi cafe called the Container Cafe. We grabbed some Bundaberg Ginger Beer and enjoyed the sunshine in the garden next door.

After wandering around the stadium grounds for a while, we headed off to ANOTHER Kiwi cafe called The Counter Cafe. It was super busy, so we grabbed some Chicken pies and coffee to takeaway and sat out the front in the sun. The pies were delicious, and worth the 25 minutes we had to wait for them!

So now we can tick East London off our list, it was a great way to spend a sunny day, but our legs were so sore the next day after all that walking!