Maiden

This place has a unique selection of interesting and kitschy gifts. They even threw in a miniature rubber ducky at my request. Can’t wait to see what they have next time I visit.

It was my wife’s 30^th birthday at the weekend. I was running behind schedule and was desperately trying to find somewhere that sold things to decorate the bar we were having her birthday in. I looked up Maiden on the internet and it said that it opened until 18:30 on Saturdays. I got there at 18:00 and rang the bell as instructed on the door. The guy in the shop completely ignored me. So I knocked again and again and made a sign to indicate I only wanted 2 minutes, again pretty much completely ignored. People like that don’t deserve people to buy things from them, hardly good customer service.

The reason my friend and I went to Maiden was for their Halloween Gorey Cakes. A flatmate of mind found it on the news, saying it was the best realistic cakes they have seen, and the videos had a dead corpse as a cake, and these bleeding hearts as a cake, which were not that expensive, only 3.50 pounds. My friend and I went there and there was a queue, where we saw right off a roadkill cake and the torso of a woman that was cut in half. The road kill cake looked really realistic, yet I was disappointed in the torso of the woman, since I was expecting extremely Gorey, with my history of watching scary movies with psychotic killers. We arrived at 2 pm, and they opened at Noon, When we finally went downstairs to the bakery, the baker was all covered in theatrical blood, adding to the eerie mood, yet the space was really cramped and people in line were getting antsy to get their cakes. I did not know that the bakery closes right when they sell out of products, so when I got to the cashier and ordered the bleeding aorta that I was anticipating, it was sold out! Bummed out, I resorted to getting a cupcake that had bloody stitches on top, which ended up looking more realistic than the woman’s torso in the display. I also got a friend a needle with jelly and absinthe, which was creative. The cupcake was really delicious too! It had a cream cheese frosting and the blood was a raspberry jelly, which made it look more realistic than bright red blood. The Gorey cakes was a very creative idea, and makes customers travel from all over London, since it was only open for Halloween weekend! So next time, i recommend showing up at opening to get the bleeding heart or the skull of a deer, or maybe even shit on a stick if you dare (chocolate ha ha). Some are unrealistic, but others are uncanny, such as the bleeding heart or stitches cupcake. The icing on the cake is that they are all delicious! :) It made my Halloween weekend even more special.

I simply love this new gorge shop! Great style in gifts.

A unique gift shop a la Magma meets Design Museum.
The stock consists of the wittiest cards, toys, home accessories, books, games, jewellery… and most importantly
of those crazy arty ‘things.’ (i.e. plastic egg hatching a basil plant)