E20 vision: why the Olympic district is London's hippest new postcode

From the wooden crates artfully arranged next to the counter and piled high with fresh lemons to the cute clipboards on to which menus are fixed, everything about Signorelli’s Italian café is crying out to be Instagrammed.

There are jugs of sunflowers and Anglepoise lamps; the smell of almost-baked focaccia bread hangs in the air enticing a steady stream of locals (who know exactly when it is due out of the oven). It sounds like Portobello, it could be Borough or De Beauvoir, but this is E20.

Which is, before you ask, London’s newest and, by many accounts, most covetable postcode. Created in 2011 to cover the part of East London which would be transformed by the Olympics, it incorporates the Olympic Park —— the stadium, the twisted red ArcelorMittal Orbit and the acclaimed Zaha Hadid Aquatics Centre — as well as parts of Stratford, Homerton, Leyton and Bow.

It’s bordered by Hackney Wick, where the post-Olympic boom has seen dozens of shops and cafés spring up and brought an influx of investment. At its heart is the former athlete’s village, which housed 23,000 competitors and has now been reborn as East Village, a neighbourhood of 3,000 homes. By 2020 an E20 ‘cultural quarter’ will see a new V&A museum, Sadler’s Wells theatre and London College of Fashion campus. Vogue recently described E20 as ‘London’s hippest postcode’, hailing it as ‘a new fashion and arts hub’ in the making.

It couldn’t be more different from 2005 when London won the Olympics bid; then E20 existed only in fiction as the postcode of EastEnders’ Walford. The area it now covers was a derelict wasteland; the strange part of town that came after Hackney ended and before Stratford properly began. But the promise of transformation, the creation of a thriving place where people would want to live and play long after the Games, was a key element of London’s Olympics bid.

Three years on, things are starting to take shape. The temptation to create some sort of Olympicsville has been avoided; the only direct nod to the Games will be the addition of small plaques in the entrance halls of the East Village blocks indicating which teams stayed where. The one-bedroom flats, designed to cram in as many athletes as possible, have been reconfigured into one-, two-, and three- bedroom apartments, and four-bedroom townhouses. The first residents began arriving 18 months ago and there are now 5,000 tenants. The flats will not be to everyone’s taste — our love affair with Victorian conversions means that new-builds can appear soulless and bland by comparison — but accommodation designed for 2015 certainly has its advantages (including power showers, energy-saving lighting, double glazing and free superfast broadband).

But the real draw is the sense of character and community. Buzz, of course, is the most difficult thing to introduce in a district where everything is carefully curated from the top down. Which takes us back to Signorelli. As the area takes shape, one of its great achievements is the absence of chains. In contrast to the brand-lined ‘streets’ of Westfield Stratford in the east corner of E20, only independent businesses have been allowed in to the Village complex (with one exception: a slightly out of place, but no doubt very useful, Sainsbury’s Local).

This has proved an attraction. As Signorelli’s charismatic owner Alberto Rosmini puts it: ‘I chose [a place] where I felt people would invest in helping something new survive.’ He opened ahead of schedule so that locals working from home during the Tube strikes had somewhere to take a break; one customer was so impressed he posted a photo on Facebook. ‘Within 20 minutes there were other people popping in, excited to try us out,’ he says. Andrew Eakin, owner of the independent wine merchants Bottle Apostle next to Victory Park, describes local loyalty as ‘unexpected but brilliant’. A tasting he advertised last month, expecting a few dozen people, received 200 responses.

Signorelli and Bottle Apostle will be soon be joined by a new outpost of Dalston’s popular coffee spot Tina, We Salute You, in a space with huge windows overlooking a rugged and tall-grassed wetland area. The Dalston original is much-loved for its artists-in-residence events and top-notch flat whites; the E20 version will also offer cocktails. A short walk west, along the banks of Hackney’s River Lee, the area is peppered with art galleries, yet more independent cafés and lively bars and pubs.

While much of East London has been affected by spiralling house prices and the booming buy-to-let industry, a concerted effort is being made in the Olympic zone to avoid this. Rental apartments aren’t cheap (a furnished one-bedroom flat costs £405 a week), but the fact that there are only a few shared-ownership flats available to buy is a deliberate move by Get Living London, the agency which oversees much of the area’s development, to avoid buy-to-leave syndrome. (The East Village itself is owned by Middle Eastern firm Qatari D, who bought it for £557m.)

The housing blocks were designed by 16 international architects, with no two buildings exactly the same: one is covered in stone-coloured cladding, inspired by the Elgin Marbles; while Vesta House, which was designed by renowned London architect Deborah Saunt, has a dramatic, triangular-shaped entrance hall and a huge window in the roof. It wouldn’t look out of place in Singapore.

Indeed, if you wanted to describe this new area, it’s cities such as Singapore or Sydney with their civilised, outdoorsy vibe that draw the closest comparisons. There’s green space at every turn, but not a single Keep off the Grass sign in sight. I see an outdoor yoga class taking place on a communal lawn, and a team setting up for an outdoor screening run by The Nomad Cinema. There are communal barbecues, running tracks, ping-pong tables and an outdoor gym. Better still, people are using them.