A Look Inside London Cafes and Greasy Spoons In the Early 1990s

We’ve seen the outside of many London cafes in the 1980s and 1990s, first here then more. Now Peter Marshall pokes his camera inside London’s lost cafes and shows us around. We see lots of formica counters, brightly coloured chairs, the stainless steel urns for ready-made coffee and tea (made strong enough to melt the spoon), and the table laid out for diners: sauces (brown, yellow, red), vinegar (malt), table salt (with a few grains of uncooked rice added to stop it getting moist), a pot of sugar (white) and a large ashtray. And no, there is no outside seating. For that you need to go to Paris. The London ‘greasy spoon’ cafe has a closed door and fogged up windows, keeping the world at bay and everything steamy and cosy within.

 

 

Let’s get inside…

 

“So they went out in the dark, and all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their light on, and they walked down the road to a cafe. And they had a lovely super with sausages, chips and ice cream”

– Judith Kerr, The Tiger Who Came To Tea

 

“I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”
— Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

 

 

“A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

— Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

 

“He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination – but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.”

— Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant, Discworld, #24; City Watch, #5

 

 

Forty-eight hours later I blurted out: ‘I’ve got it!’
‘Must have been that dodgy bird you poked the other night,’ said Geezer. ‘Has your whelk turned green yet?’
Tony and Bill snickered into their plates of egg and chips. We were sitting in a greasy spoon caff in Aston. So far, everyone was getting along famously.
‘Very funny, Geezer,’ I said, waving an eggy fork at him. ‘I mean the name for our band.’
The snickering died down.
‘Go on then,’ said Tony [Iommi].
‘Well, I was on the shitter last night, and…’
‘That’s your special place?’ spluttered Bill, blobs of mushed-up egg and HP sauce flying out of his mouth.
‘Where the f**k did you think it was, Bill?’ I said. ‘The hanging gardens of f**king Babylon?”

— Ozzy Osbourne on finding the band’s name, I Am Ozzy

 

 

 

“Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table; roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon, and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs.”

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

 

 

 

More cafe culture to see here…