There is a moment on the Northern line, somewhere past Clapham, when the carriage empties of people going out and fills with people going home. For years that told you something true. South London went north for its evenings.
It does not anymore, and Tooting is the clearest example of why.
The market did it
Tooting Market and Broadway Market sit opposite each other on the high street, and between them they changed the neighbourhood’s whole relationship with the clock.
They were ordinary covered markets for decades, fishmongers and fabric stalls, shut by six. Now they hold small kitchens, wine bars, a record shop that pours, and tables that stay busy until eleven on a Friday. Nobody built a destination. They just stopped closing early, and the rest followed.
It helps that the food was already there. The stretch of Upper Tooting Road known locally as the curry mile has been serving Pakistani and South Indian cooking since the seventies, and most of it is still family run. You can eat extremely well here for twenty pounds, which is not a sentence you can write about much of Zone 1.
The lido is the other half of it
Tooting Bec Lido is a hundred metres of unheated outdoor pool, open to the public, with a row of painted changing cubicles that photograph better than anything in Shoreditch.
In summer it is a full day out. In February it is a small society of people who swim in four degrees and then stand about discussing it. Either way it gives the neighbourhood something most of London’s suburbs do not have, which is a reason for people to travel towards it rather than through it.
What this means if you are planning an evening here
Three practical things, learned the hard way.
Book the restaurant, not the area.
The good tables in Tooting go the same way they go in Soho, which surprises people who assume south London is spontaneous. A Friday table at the better places needs a few days.
Check how you are getting back.
The Northern line runs late on Friday and Saturday, and not on a Tuesday. A cab from Tooting to the centre at midnight is a real fare, not a top-up on your travelcard.
Decide where you will actually be before you arrange anything else.
This is the London rule everywhere, and it matters more the further out you go. Anyone coming to meet you, whether that is a friend from Hackney or anything else you have organised for the evening, is making a journey that the map makes look shorter than it is. Agencies list by area for exactly this reason, and a listing that shows escorts in Tooting rather than a vague London-wide claim is telling you in advance that the answer is yes. The ones that do not will tell you at half nine, which is late to find out.
Worth knowing too that specialists and generalists are different propositions, and in a neighbourhood built on its food that distinction will be familiar. A London agency for Indian escorts works the way the restaurants on this road do: a narrower list, chosen on purpose, rather than everything for everyone. Which of the two you want depends on the evening, but it is a decision worth making before you start calling.
The wider pattern
Tooting is not alone, it is just the furthest along. The same thing has happened in Peckham, in Deptford, in Walthamstow at the other end of the line. Neighbourhoods that used to export their evenings now keep them.
Partly that is rent. The small operators who would have opened in Soho fifteen years ago cannot now, so they open where they live. Partly it is that the people who moved out stopped treating the move as a compromise and started demanding their own places.
The effect for a visitor is that London has more centres than it used to. The guidebooks have not caught up, which is good news if you would rather not spend your Friday queueing behind other people holding the same guidebook.
A short Tooting evening, if you want one
Start at the lido if the weather is doing anything at all, even just to look at it. Eat on Upper Tooting Road, somewhere with a queue and no tablecloth. Move to one of the markets for the second half of the night, where the rooms are small and the music is better than it needs to be. Leave before the last train or accept the fare.
That is a better Friday than most of what the centre will sell you for three times the money, and you will be the only person you know who did it.
The short version
South London stopped going north. Tooting has the market, the food and the lido to prove it. Book ahead anyway, work out your route home first, and tell anyone meeting you the area before you tell them anything else.
