Brill
This is a place recommendation and it was added on Monday April 16, 2007 by John Keane. permanent url
This is copyright me (c) 2007.
Now that I work from home quite a bit, I’ve started trying to find a bit of variety to keep the days interesting. Sitting alone at home isn’t always the nicest way to spend a working day. Fortunately, just around the corner in Exmouth Market is Brill (formerly Clerkenwell Music), and it’s just lovely.
It’s a tiny record shop, or rather, it used to be a tiny record shop and now it’s a tiny record shop and café combo. There are always people in and out, browsing the CDs, always people in there on their laptops – taking advantage of the wifi, which is the winner for me – and there’s always an eclectic mix on the hifi.
The coffee’s good too.
Bizarrely, I find that I actually work very well in there – I go in for two hours or so at a time and find that I can be very focused, despite all the comings and goings. In a way, I think the background noise replicates the buzz of an office. White noise, clearing the head of distracted thoughts and forcing the mind to the task at hand. Working from home, where it’s much quieter, I often find the mind wandering.
Not so good for conference calls, of course.
Anyway, around about the internet, there are little nice things being said about Brill. Take this, from The Guardian, for example:
“I was working as a nursery teacher, but playing in bands and obsessively collecting records,” recalls Jeremy Brill. He abandoned teaching and opened Clerkenwell Music on Exmouth Market when he saw the neighbouring independent bookshop. “I thought it would be nice to have a CD and a book shop here,” he says. The street has changed in the past seven years, and is now a destination for eating and drinking. “I think the shops have suffered slightly,” says Brill, though he is heartened by the arrival of a weekly farmers’ market.
“We love what we sell and we make a point of being welcoming. We don’t just laugh at you whatever you ask for. If you own one jazz CD, we can tell you what else you might like. And we have a healthy cynicism – if something has had rave reviews but we don’t like it we’ll say, ‘Do you want me to tell you quite how bad the Lily Allen album is?’”
But times are hard. “We’ve had the worst year imaginable,” says Brill. “So we’ve decided we’ll have coffee and snacks, not just CDs. After all, people already use it as a place to hang out in.”
And this, from the BBC website:
Nomads certainly have lots of places to settle for an hour or two of work.
The main advantages of independents are that the coffee is sometimes exceptionally good and the wireless is often provided free
One of my favourites is Brill on Exmouth Market in central London, partly because it is also a record store – it used to be Clerkenwell Records – but mostly because there is a bench outside that I can sit on to pick up my e-mail if I’m just passing on my way to nearby City University.
I reckon I’m in there often enough as a paying customer to get away with the occasional freeloading session, although customers who nurse a single latte for hours while they work away, chatting on Skype and spending no money, aren’t good for business. I try to pay my way wherever I’m sitting.
I try to make sure I pay my share too. At least a couple of coffees and a croissant, for example, though I reckon I’ll start buying the odd cd or two. It’s more expensive than iTunes or emusic or amazon or Fopp, but the extra two quid surcharge is good value for the accommodation. In fact, I’ve already started: I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I bought the Mika record in there today. Not for me! It’s a gift. It’s certainly handy having a real life record shop so close for those moments when you need something physical and can’t wait two days for delivery, so I hope Brill is around for plenty of time to come. Brill.
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