Discoveries, aspirations, perils, mourning, love, deceit and silent company; as the privately public venue reacts with the liquid treats, the inconspicuous café becomes a Mecca of secret enchantment. Whether with a friend, acquaintance or solitary, it is a chance to indulge in yourself or your accomplice. Alone is very good. Like a catholic repenting your sins behind a swirly grate, you are fantastic, beautifully blighted and anonymous; protected by a bubble of seating and varying souls. Café strangers know nothing and never ask why. 1963, Bernard Kops writes in The World Is A Wedding: “So I came into my kingdom of Soho where I could be as mad as I wanted…in a café called The Alex I wrote the day away. The bums of Soho became my family, the café my womb.”

Looking into the history of the café, one finds a place of poetical loners and riotous debaters; Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir discussing the theories of existentialism; Keats musing in Vienna; Henrik Ibsen in the same spot at 2pm everyday in Oslo, Freud holding consultations in a wood panelled room in Vienna; Kafka reading the first draft of Metamorphosis aloud in a back room in Prague; Oscar Wilde scandalising himself dramatically by flaunting about with young men. Full of the potential of tomorrow and the excitement of the moment, the café has held the beating hearts of the common, the influential and the silent peoples. Those who were in the background of centuries past, who sought hushed company and escapism, posthumously having their hearts laid open, quiet no more. Cue pun: Café culture is brewing up a treat in Bristol.

In 2003, 358 years after the first café was born in Venice, the Commons Housing, Planning and Local Government Committee called for an “urban renaissance” in cities including Bristol. With less “vertical drinking”, the Committee stated in its report that cities needed more cafés open longer hours, for a calm and pleasant urban environment. “Cafe Culture” in Bristol has since grown, with establishments popping up and blooming all over the city: Coffee No1, Clifton’s Primrose Cafe, Montpelier’s Bristolian (a true beauty), all the Lounge’s, the Boston Tea Parties, various cafés all along the harbour and no-one can be blind to the success of The Canteen. It’s a delight to walk around the city with contented beings dappling the pavements and breathing life into buildings. While many a café in Paris stacks away its bamboo tables and chairs for good, the recession hitting the loved culture hard, Bristol is finding its café feet. Our cafés are no longer there primarily for businessmen’s tuna baguettes, bored buggy pushers and ‘informal’ meetings, now in Bristol cafés are increasingly for the purpose of sitting in a metaphorical hammock. How marvellous for all!

1986, Jeffrey Bernard writes in Low Life: “One of the things I loathed most about school, the army and regular employment was the feeling that I was missing something and that in the pubs, clubs, cafés and dives there was some sort of magic practice that I wasn’t able to conjure with.”

Looking into the cup of the future; late night alcohol free cafés would be great (not if you are at “just want chips” level of wasted however). Like times past, Bordeaux’s late night cafés are full of discussion, reflection and peace. You know…when the night is over in its present sense and you don’t want to go home yet, that prophetic feeling when you want to chat (indeed it may be rubbish but tangible feeling is in the quiet of the night) - the next stage of the evening when the day horizons are raw and unformed is where new avenues can be discovered. Café culture should rise to the heights it can in Bristol. The cafe breeds clarity, a stop-clock for the road runner and an ever important and historical first aid kit. So let us all go, sink into a seat, muse a bit and chiefly, just ‘be’.

Helen Martin
Photos by Laura Palmer