The first major phase of London’s highly anticipated Elizabeth Line opened in May, boasting wide platforms, shiny new trains and snazzy purple moquette seat covers. Recent days have seen the latest stage of its opening, including a new stop at Bond Street station, and improved connections throughout. The line runs from Shenfield in Essex and Abbey Wood in south London to Heathrow and Reading in the west in a vaguely “X”shape, putting several lesser-known areas on the map.
Although it was at one point the largest transport engineering project in Europe and has taken more than a decade and billions of pounds to complete, my first thoughts about the Elizabeth Line were not about infrastructure development and taxes. As soon as I looked at the map of all the stations, I realised that it seems tailor-made for an Indian restaurant crawl.
There are small, homely, inexpensive venues that serve Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Gujarati, Kerala and Tamil communities in Romford, Ilford, Manor Park, Forest Gate and Whitechapel in east London, and Punjabis in West Ealing, Hanwell, Southall and Slough in the west. Many have settled in these areas since the early and mid 20th century.