As Clarise Faria, the curator of the Loft Project, a private club that invites acclaimed chefs to cook meals in an airy apartment for select guests, said: “There’s no reason to go to the rest of London.”

There’s certainly no reason to go elsewhere to eat. In 2005, a shed behind a former school that now contains an artists’ studio, where Rochelle Street meets the leafy traffic circle Arnold Circus, became Rochelle Canteen, a restaurant open only for lunch. The food is bright, direct and unapologetically English: fare includes dishes like a salad of fresh peas, favas and pea shoots, and a whole sole sautéed in butter and served with cucumber and fennel. The spot has a casual elegance, and it’s easy to linger over a midweek lunch, with dogs napping in the restaurant’s walled garden and neighbors catching up with one another.

On the other side of Arnold Circus is Leila’s Shop, a small specialty store with raw wood shelves, drying sausages and nougat imported from Isfahan, Iran. On a recent visit, I was browsing the shelves of house-made jams with the cookbook author Anissa Helou, who sometimes holds cooking classes in her nearby loft, and after we stepped outside, a perfectly silent electric car whipped around the corner. The driver and Ms. Helou knew each other, and as they said their hellos under a bank of trees four stories tall, I felt that I was looking into the future, to a time when cities are gentle and everybody is friendly.

Things are busier a few blocks to the south on Redchurch Street. There are boutiques like Caravan (tasteful bric-a-brac) and Hostem (sartorial concept designs for men), and there’s Boundary, a hotel and restaurant that the designer and hotelier Terence Conran opened last year. Shoreditch House, a branch of Soho House that opened as a hotel this spring, is nearby. So is Dirty House, a soot-gray private artists’ residence designed by the conceptual architect David Adjaye; the building’s cantilevered roof seems to hover at night, as the interior lights below give it a luminescent glow.

And then there’s Columbia Road, home to an open-air flower market on Sundays since the 19th century. More recently, it has welcomed dozens of tiny shops that bustle during the week.