Part 2: A year of Wooden City
My 15 favourite places so far
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Today’s newsletter is part two of a special issue to mark a year of this newsletter.
You can read part one here, which is about what I’ve written so far and what’s coming next.
My favourite thing to do in the world is to go around London visiting places I haven’t been to before. But almost as much as this, I love to go back.
Repeat visits are important to me because they are how you get to know a place. They provide more opportunities to speak to people, to notice things you haven’t before. With restaurants, going back means sitting somewhere new, catching the dining room in a different light or with a different crowd, and trying something else on the menu – such as a dish that the owner recommended last time.
This list is about the places I find myself wanting to revisit the most. To write it I started by making a spreadsheet with every place I’ve been to for Wooden City. Then I scrolled through it and marked the ones that gave me a powerful urge to return, before I whittled that longlist down to 15 places where that feeling was strongest.
So these picks are based on gut feeling. The list is also unranked and the entries are fresh. If this newsletter inspires you to visit anywhere, make it these places.
Auntie Annie’s
Catford’s good food and valuable community spaces are undersung by the city at large. I set out to try and change that by writing about everywhere that struck me as beautiful or important in SE6. The best meal I ate while researching that piece was a container of jerk chicken and macaroni cheese from Auntie Annie’s, which I ate on a sunny June afternoon on a bench on Inchmery Road.
1, Sandhurst Market, London SE6 1DL
Brunsy Seafood Bar
Brunsy’s straightforward proprietor doesn’t make a song and dance about the fact that he runs one of the last surviving seafood stalls in the East End. Instead, he just serves tubs of cold shellfish to whoever wants them. I used to be more romantic about vanishing spaces like these, but when they're this functional and unsentimental it can feel like you’re projecting something onto them that isn’t true. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a place is: “this exists and this is what it’s like.”