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The Tea Rooms in Museum Street
is a kind of evanescent EveryCafe most
notable for its refraction of two previous centuries
of cafe architecture:
19C Lyons Tea House hall and 30s Milk Bar.
The Zita Snack Bar round the
corner (at 232 Shaftesbury Ave) offers a scent
of Mid Century Modern Espresso bar, but the Tea
Rooms' yellowing exterior
40s signage offset by a large jolly green deco
typeface almost makes it seem
even older. Within, it's wall-to-wall carmine
mosaic Formica retains a
quintessential, poignant quality of lost English
drabness. Pure Pinter for
now people!
The rows of little utility pews,
classic steaming Gaggia machine and the
laminate table tops all accent what Harry Hopkins'
in his social study of
the 40s and 50s 'The New Look' (Secker and Warburg
1964) saw as a new
architectural idiom where: "stark and strong...the
alloys and the plastics,
bright, sterile, precision machined, seemed to
belong not merely to a
different period but to a totally different universe..."
Before the 70s high street rash
of injection-moulded burger joints and the
irruption of 90s' US coffee shops, Britain was
blessed with thousands of
these vintage Formica 'classic' cafes. They exemplified
the 'Contemporary'
look of the Festival of Britain. A move from a
desperate and dingy 40s era
into a fresh sense of the future accenting a stripped-down,
primary
decorative art. Moving on from the all-white uniformity
of Modern styling,
the temperate Scandinavian origins of the New
Look were manifest in
materials like vinyl, plywood, synthetic laminates
and chrome. All became
especially evident in kitchen interiors and functional
commercial spaces
like cafés as flush finishes, vibrant laminated
surfaces and colourful table
ceramics become popular.
These yearning spaces galvanised
post-war British cultural life. In his
study of 50 British Architecture 'Building A Better
Tomorrow' Robert Elwall
notes: 'The vogue for coffee bars...provided a
whiff of exotic
cosmopolitanism and gave eclecticism free rein.'
Cafes acted as incubators
for a generation of postwar writers, artists,
designers, musicians and
sexual subculturists. They added colour to Britain's
post-war social,
artistic and commercial scene. Without them the
60s might never have been so seismic.
The Parisian café is
justly held in high esteem. So too the US diner
with
its heritage of candy-colorized Americana. But
the British cafes - those
purlieus of Proustian possibility - were never
given their due. Throughout
the 80s & 90s cafes like The Tea Rooms fell
into disuse. Largely despised,
dishonoured and forgotten, most are now vanishing
in a welter of
redevelopment and refits, brutally Starbuck-ed
by the big drinks chains.
Too often dismissed as 'greasy spoons', we should
laud the faded attractions
of the authentically forlorn caff. The last remaining
ones - with their
utility aesthetic and occasional Mid Century Modern
detailings - are little
gems of British vernacular high street commercial
design.
Adrian Maddox runs www.classiccafes.co.uk
and is the author of an extensive forthcoming
illustrated study of the secret life and times
of the great British 'classic' cafe to be published
in early spring 2003.
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