Inside Chop Shop Tavern - and tracing the unstoppable rise of Leyton Midland
Plus: Swirl small plates review, 3 top Turkish dine-in lunches under £10 including Leytonstone's Sirac and (anti-)Valentine's round-up
In late summer 2020, as lockdowns swung back and forth, I put together a Leytonstoner guide to “one little corner of E10 definitely on the up – despite Covid and all its accompanying doom and gloom.” That area was, of course, Leyton Midland (not sure when we all dropped the “Road”, but somewhere along the line we did).
I called the article “A mini travel guide for locals”, the phrase, in fact, distilling the essence of what this publication is about - an attempt to view the neighbourhood with fresh eyes. While the catalyst was the opening of Gravity Well’s larger taproom, there was a flurry of other activity, too: what’s now Peruvian-Japanese dining room Bamboo Mat was about to become the short-lived John Dory, Abbott’s Park was being newly landscaped, and artist Maud Milton had just installed her mosaic roundel on the Overground, as she had in Leytonstone High Road. The guide also highlighted houseplant store Green East, since relocated to inside Perky Blenders, and the now-closed Hanedan, the Turkish cafe whose chef would tirelessly make gözleme in the window.
But of course the area’s history goes back way further than that. So now let’s rewind to 1894, when the station, originally known as “Leyton”, opened as part of the Tottenham and Forest Gate Railway. Building the track on brick viaducts as only the Victorians did, a whopping 386 arches form the route. Just twenty years after completion, tragedy stuck in 1915 when three bombs obliterated both the station’s ticket office and a billiard hall in the arches (I’m guessing where Gravity Well is now), killing four people.
The station was renamed Leyton Midland Road in 1949, before a gradual decline in the decades to come. By the early noughties, when I first used the line, it was an unreliable slog between deserted stations, its carriages unloved and empty. All of which changed with its reboot as part of the bright-orange London Overground in time for the 2012 Olympics.
And so onto 2016, when Leytonstoner published a first story on the area with the launch of hip multi-purpose retail space Host. Since then, other independent businesses have steadily snowballed, from the arrival of seminal coffee shop Perky Blenders in 2017 to fitness studios Hotpod and Fit As, as well as a wet fish shop and, in 2023, the smash hit smokehouse Burnt. Nearby is Italian deli Coccole, secondhand bookshop Quinto (relocated from Charing Cross Road) and cavernous creative studios, Mainyard.
Nonetheless, as recently as 2021, in his book Unchartered Streets, locally-born author Matt Haynes dismissed Leyton Midland as “the most negligible thoroughfare in London to lend its name to a station” - before adding, in a moment of prescience, “as yet there is no artisan sourdough. But it will come.”
So what of once-grubby Tilbury Road, the current darling of the neighbourhood? There’s very little history online, so let’s turn instead to Leyton-raised Danny Saunders, owner of both Leyton Calling and the new Chop Shop Tavern. “These arches were all originally banana storage that used to come from Tilbury Docks,” he says, “hence the name of the road. And in the 1950s an actual monkey lived in one and they’d feed it bananas. Honest-to-God.”
The Leyton Monkey? Sounds like the latest piss-take local Instagram account. Anyway, by the 1980s and 90s when Danny was growing up, his dad used to own the stretch of arches - all mechanic’s garages. And by the age of 16 he’d bagged an arch of his own where he set up a business doing cars.
Fast forward to the early 'teens and one Hayden Gale, founder of canned booze specialists Point Cocktails, was looking for somewhere to “experiment in”. He took an arch here purely because “a decade ago it was the cheapest place in town,” he says. In the years since, he’s “seen it all, from drug dealers to fly tipping.” Now he runs Leyton Calling’s al fresco bar in the yard during summer months.
In the last few years, Tilbury arches has been home to several streetfood and takeaway businesses like Mo Sushi, Nabemono, a Chick ‘n’ Sours storage unit and the successful Decatur, whose lockdown project escalated to packed Saturday afternoon outdoor seafood boil parties.
But the catalyst for the current spurt could be levelled at back-to-basics craft brewery Libertalia, who took over Gravity Wells’ vacated taproom in 2023: this in turn attracted cocktail bar Leyton Calling and BYOB Caribbean Ochi (reviewed here - the jerk chicken is a must). The most recent arrivals are, of course, natural wine bar Swirl - and now, Chop Shop Tavern, which occupies the very same arch Danny had when he was a teen.
In this week’s issue, find out what happened when I went for a snoop around its spanking new interior earlier this week, as well as trying some of the quite outlandish drinks on offer.
And finally, this thoroughfare continues to bloom: “northern pie shop and bakery” (in owner Jack’s words) Win’s is next - more on that here - while an artisan patisserie is opening up on the ground floor of the shiny new apartment block on the corner. So, the question is: are we now entering the Leyton Riviera years? Like most things, the answer will be clearer when the sun comes out.
Welcome to this week’s issue and thanks for reading. First up, the associated Instagram account with this Substack is @londonbelongs (on other platforms like Blue Sky, FB and X it’s just @leytonstoner). If you value the work that has gone into this history of Leyton Midland and Tilbury Road, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription below. Until the end of this month it costs £5 a month, or just £45 a year: that’s the same as a pint of milk (or 86p) a week. For that modest outlay you can bathe in local food and culture stories, longer reads, frank restaurant reviews and the latest foodie gossip. You even get to suggest what I cover (I listen to everyone’s suggestions). And the more people who pay to subscribe, the more in-depth stories I can publish.
Here’s what paid subscribers can expect in the rest of today’s newsletter:
A proper snoop round Chop Shop Tavern, more pics - and I sample highlights from its surprising drinks list
The best small plates at Swirl reviewed - and what to drink
Three awesome Turkish restaurants in Leyton and Leytonstone where you can dine in well for a tenner or less (including a BYOB)
A fromage-free Valentine’s Day (and anti-Valentine’s) round-up
Why you voted for more Forest Gate and Stratford - plus the latest pop-ups and one-offs this coming week
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Chop Shop Tavern: a proper banger
And so onto the preview of Chop Shop from my visit earlier this week.
First things first, inside it really does live up to its promise to be a “modern tavern”. With its candlelit nooks, copper fixtures (repurposed from old boilers) and reclaimed dark wood lining the walls, it gives pure 18th century highwayman vibes. But there’s also a surprise when you enter.