Long nights on Brick Lane

Riad Azar on ethnographic research in London’s Brick Lane “…and then I realised that time was circular”, a friend told me after reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel 100 Years of Solitude. Our discussion was stubborn, returning to me time and again during my first few weeks in London. I was about to begin an MSc programme in Political Sociology; it was time to think like a social scientist. But it must be possible, I thought to myself, to find a way to describe changes not only in time, but also in space. Physicists agreed that space-time was a curvature; linearity might only be a constraining factor on our human perspective. My ethnographic fieldwork on Brick Lane served as the lab to test out this idea, to counterpose the variables of time and space in order to describe social change in an urban environment, and to allow literature to inspire my epistemological foundations.