Once a place of refuge for old ladies and single mums, chances are your local café has been gentrified out of all accessibility. Gustav Temple rages against the dying of the greasy spoon

The town I grew up in during the 1980s was a scruffy little seaside place called St Ives in Cornwall. We all know what it became, and the current high-end version, with its fine dining restaurants, chi-chi Airbnbs and branches of JoJo Maman Bébé is, at least for some visitors, a good thing because it feels just like home – if you happen to live in Maida Vale.

Back in 1982, there was a café where my mother used to take my brother and me, right on the high street in between the Woolworth’s and the Spar. Tudor Café was its name, a title that the owner had not spent very long trying to think of, for the interior design was mock Tudor, with old black beams and engravings of Henry VIII on the walls painted a seventies shade of pastel pink.

Tudor Café’s principal customer base was old ladies popping in from the hairdresser’s across the road for a cup of tea and an iced bun. The crockery was white with a red willow pattern, the tea served in little metal teapots with a lid that flipped open from the handle. If you felt like splashing out, you could order a ham salad, which would come on a huge oval plate with some crisps on the side. Prices were affordable for everyone from pensioners to single mothers with two kids.

Those old ladies and parents on benefits still exist, but whither do they roam in search of a modestly priced tea and a bun? Every town in the country used to have an equivalent to the Tudor Café on its high street, along with a greasy spoon café with more workaday servings of huge breakfasts, tea served in stained mugs, the coffee poured from a vast metal urn where it steeped all day. Not delicious, but cheap, with prices that were the same countrywide.

I haven’t been to St Ives for two decades, but I can imagine what the building that once housed the Tudor Café is today. If it isn’t a shop selling surf-themed clothing with a name like Salt or Tide (is the modern trend for single-word brands purely to save on signage?) for people who don’t surf, then it may still be a café. But I think we all know that it will not be called something as innocent as Tudor Café. And there will be no old ladies in there, chatting to each other and alleviating their loneliness. There will be no single mums trying to get their children an affordable treat on their way to the benefits office.

The café will be called something like “Spün” (you see what they did there?) and there will be no engravings of Tudor kings on the walls. There might be some huge, poorly executed paintings of spoons, or, more likely, a wall-mounted record player emitting the scratchy warblings of some moustachioed millennial. The staff will all be aged under 30, dressed in a blend of charity shop jumpers and dungarees from Salt. The reverence for the small-batch coffee they serve you will be matched by the disdain with which they serve it, and they will charge you, for a tiny biscuit that dissolves as soon as it comes into contact with your hot drink, roughly the same as you used to pay at the Tudor Café for a gigantic ham salad.

Mass local outrage has greeted the City of London Corporation’s (CLC) recent decision to allow café chain Daisy Green to take over four community cafés in northwest London. All four establishments were told they would have to give up their premises by the end of January, despite strong opposition from the thousands of local residents who don’t want their beloved cafés to be replaced by an expensive chain.

The CLC said Daisy Green will bring “upgraded menus, improved facilities and welcoming spaces, and commit to affordability, sustainability and partnering with local suppliers.” Yet the cafés currently serving the community are already doing precisely that, and more, most of them running events for children and art exhibitions. They are far more than just businesses making money from hungry locals. Those same locals, who allowed the community cafés to flourish, making them ripe for a corporate takeover, won’t be able to afford Daisy Green’s prices, and don’t feel they will be welcomed in the same way as they were at their cherished community café.

Daisy Green is an Australian-themed chain with branches in the trendier parts of London. Their website informs us that they too host local events: “‘Paired’ is an intimate dining series celebrating Australia’s most respected and exciting wine producers. Each evening brings together a seasonal, chef-led menu with thoughtfully paired wines, guided by the winemaker or a senior brand ambassador.”*

Sounds like the old ladies and the mums on benefits will be queuing up for that one.

What’s at stake here is the loss of what once blurred the lines between profit and community. The old-style cafés earned enough money to pay their rent and rates and their staff wages, while also providing a hub for local people to meet each other. The only people who can afford places like Daisy Green are often in such places on their laptops, earning the cash to pay their bill. Does community matter to them? And, if it doesn’t at the moment, what will they do when they’re an old lady themselves and wish to get out of their lonely house and meet some other people?

* Incidentally, try reading that sentence minus all seven adjectives or adverbs, and it sounds vaguely like normal English. A “chef-led” menu, for goodness’ sake! You may be aware that you are reading an “editor-led” magazine’ at the moment.

This article is from Idler #108.

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