The Arab street

Londoners have no need to travel to Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus or some other city of the Middle East in order to experience the sensation of being in the Arab world. A visit to the southernmost stretch of the Edgware Road is quite sufficient. The dozens of Arab cafZs, restaurants and shops which line the straight and otherwise dreary main road from Marble Arch to the Marylebone Flyover are thronged with customers, especially at night and especially during the summer, when thousands of Arabs come on holiday to London. To sit here and drink a cup of mint tea, while Arab television, music and conversation fill your ears and around you the Arabs read their newspapers and smoke their water-pipes, is to feel something of the charm of the Orient. It is a charm lost on some long-established residents of the area, who want to enjoy a good night’s sleep. They say it is monstrous for the Arabs to wish to transform the whole character of the Edgware Road, by subordinating the needs of those who live there to the demands of Arab tourists, who like to sleep during the day, rise at three or four in the afternoon, go shopping in Oxford Street, go to Hyde Park, perhaps have a rest and a snack and then meet late in the evening in the Edgware Road for dinner, after which some of the men will repair to nightclubs or casinos, while the more devout will prefer to sit and drink coffee or tea until about five in the morning, whereupon they will go to dawn prayers, or else pray at home, have breakfast at home and go to bed. Westminster Council has generally sided with the residents. It has refused to allow the all-night opening of Arab cafZs in the Edgware Road, and it does all it can to prevent flats in the vast blocks which fill much of this neighbourhood from being let for less than three months at a time.