‘No parties! I’m a working class man and this is a working class caff. All I want is doom and gloom. And nothing’

Lorenzo Marioni, owner of the New Piccadilly caff, Soho, on being asked if there was going to be a party when the caff closed, 2007.

The New Piccadilly opened on Soho’s Denman Street in 1951 when Lorenzo was seven and he started his work there peeling potatoes, the family business passed down to him and he was the business owner when the caff closed in 2007. The site, nestled round the back of Piccadilly Circus, was, naturally, earmarked for redevelopment and so the New Piccadilly is no more.

The New Piccadilly was a great example of the classic ‘Formica caff’, the theme of the interior being based on the Festival of Britain (of course!) and hadn’t been changed since – red vinyl booths accompanied by matching red wall mounted lamps, a menu as old as the business, canary yellow walls, plastic flower displays, perfect squiggle-design Formica tables and, dominating the counter, the giant pink espresso machine.  

The Regency in Pimlico is my particular favourite London caff, a gorgeous mix of modernist type and Deco pomp meets egg and chips and gingham curtainettes. A tiny lady with gargantuan lungs bellows each and every order from behind the counter and so it’s your own damn fault if you miss your steak pudding.     

It is a sad thing to lose such beautiful spaces filled with beautiful things but the New Piccadilly and The Regency are/were a small minority amongst the genre of the British caff, most of which could not be described as beautiful. Often the unique caff vernacular does not emerge from careful interior design but from practical and economic choices – plastic seating and Formica table surfaces which can be easily wiped clean, durable, resilient flooring tiles or lino, cheap, consumable tableware – net curtains, malt vinegar, tabloid papers. So why should we lament, or indeed even care, about their ubiquitous disappearance?

In 1989 the American urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his seminal text The Great Good Place, described the concept of the third place, a social space distinct from the two standard shared spaces of work and home but one which is equally as important to its community. These places, argues Oldenburg, are vital for the act of informal public gathering which is required for effective democracy and for a functioning and engaged civil society. The traditional caff is surely one such place – Oldenberg describes the ‘true’ third place as being defined by a series of characteristics, including that the space should act as a social leveller that a person’s economic or social status should not matter within that space thereby achieving a sense of commonality amongst all of its inhabitants, he states that they should be accessible (both in terms of local to many and free or inexpensive to participate) and that the space should be inhabited by regulars who in turn attract newcomers by making the space feel playful and welcoming. These characteristics describe most experiences of ‘the caff’ – often the last place in a city where a cup of tea costs 50p and a filling breakfast can be consumed for a couple of quid, a space in which you can engage in discussion, people watch, do a crossword or merely nurse a cuppa, in the caff it is possible to spend 15 minutes or 2 hours, a busy space which allows for time. 

It is this disappearance of a unique social space which I regret the most as I walk by the rows of chain coffeehouses which we have developed such a taste for. Of course our streets evolve and 'heart attack on a plate' all day breakfasts are perhaps not the best dietary choice but it would be a very sad day indeed that we could no longer get a Typhoo in a mug because we had drowned in a sea of skinny caramel latte with our name on it.