Cafes are the new pubs

We are finally putting down our pints and heading for a slice of cake and a cappuccino at the new local instead. Nick Curtis salutes London’s café society
Radius Images / Alamy
26 February 2013

It happened overnight. The Cable Bar and Cafe, an old-fashioned greasy spoon café behind Kennington Church, had been defunct and shuttered for two years. Suddenly, as I stepped off the bus one night, it was open again but now transformed into a warm, wood-panelled Shangri-la in an area blighted by blind-eyed shopfronts. The air was rich with the scent of cake and cappuccino steam, the artfully mis-matched chairs strewn with the attractive young chatting animatedly over their laptops. There were fixie bikes chained outside. Yes, in south London.

Colleagues reported similar flowerings in unloved areas. One, who usually relates her tussles with the crack dealers of Archway, came in one day, slack-mouthed at the sight of people “smiling and talking about books” in a new café called Vagabond in Stroud Green. Another enthused about a coffee shop where she’d fed her toddlers for a month while having her kitchen done. The truly hip in my workplace smirked and reeled off a list of cool, independent cafés they’d been to for, oooh, months.

So the news that London’s bright young things are deserting pubs for cafés came as no surprise to us. This is the new frontline. With austerity, health scares and corporate tax dodges all over the headlines it doesn’t seem right to spaff money away in the boozer or at a corporate chain that pays tax in the Swiss canton of Zug. But an inviting, independent coffee shop? A place where you can actually meet a friend without being intimidated? Where you can hear yourself speak? Now that is an affordable pleasure.

“I think a lot of people associate going to the pub with socialising with colleagues after work,” says Bea Vo, who founded the coffee shop Bea’s of Bloomsbury in Theobald’s Road in 2008, and now runs offshoots at St Paul’s and Maltby Street Market. “Pubs are noisy, you are jostling for space. In cafés you get a seat, you are not going to drink too much alcohol and do too much damage to your liver, and you get a chance really to interact with someone, one to one.”

When Vo quit as pastry chef at Nobu to go it alone she wanted to create “a space for me, a place to evoke nostalgic memories, where like-minded people could enjoy themselves with cake that tasted good and coffee that tasted good.” The new cafés are individualistic — “I purposely made it not pink,” says Vo — and designed to make customers linger, unlike the previous wave of cupcake and cookie shops.

“It’s about good service, both front-of-house and in the kitchen, and passion,” says Nick Stylianou of Gracelands café in Kensal Rise, when asked what makes a good café. Formerly a photographer, Stylianou and his French teacher wife Cecile liked Gracelands so much they bought the company three years ago. They now serve a cross-section of locals, from yummy mummies (the Stylianous have one toddler and a baby on the way) to “fashion designers, interior designers and architects”.

One of the functions of the new cafés, which usually have free wi-fi and and unfussed attitude to table-hogging, is to give freelancers in the creative industries a more hospitable place to work and meet than Starbucks.

Gracelands also has a “symbiotic” relationship with neighbouring businesses offering massage and baby yoga, does “a roaring trade in Bloody Marys” at the weekend, and has started offering the occasional evening session for locals. “There is booze available but the intention is not to get larried,” says Stylianou. “It’s more about lovely food and socialising.”

The numbers speak for themselves. Around 29 per cent of pubs across the UK have closed in the past 25 years: the café sector — including chains and independents — grew by 7.5 per cent in 2011 alone. Jim Winship, director of the Café Society, which promotes the industry in the UK, thinks the trend will continue.

“The pub is seen as more traditional, which is less attractive to the young, while the café has changed completely,” he says. “I remember when cafés were Formica-based, greasy, unkempt or somewhere you’d buy a sandwich to eat elsewhere. Now they’ve turned themselves into a place to meet and socialise. Our membership keeps growing. The high street has become based around the café as they have taken over empty shops. In fact, the café could be the saviour of the high street, making it a social hub rather than just a place to shop.”

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