English café culture: not what Blair expected

Café culture is booming but it is an English culture not any sort of continental pastiche

We went to have lunch in a farm shop today. It remains an odd thing that some of the best cafés are found in places like this rather than in standalone locations. The café at Keelham Farm Shop (which is, if you are looking for it, is outside Skipton, the farm shop at Keelham is called Robertshaws) is excellent as is the shop itself but you do wonder how these sorts of location became so prevalent and successful. The two garden centres near us have cafés as does the outdoor clothing store in the old mill at Coldspring. Supermarkets have cafés and even high street clothes shops will sell you coffee and cake.

When Tony Blair announced the reform of licencing laws back in 2003, the idea was presented as a means of getting more of a continental café feel to England’s nightlife. People scoffed at the idea making reference to the British weather, our penchant for session boozing and a general lack of continental joie de vivre. Others pointed to the extension of the hours for pubs and restaurants as the beginning of the end, something that would be followed by an epidemic of drunkenness and associated debauchery.

Today there are about 223,000 food and drink outlets licenced to sell alcohol which is the highest since national records were first compiled in 2008. This increase in the places able to sell you a drink has, however, happened while the number of pubs continues to decline. According to the British Beer and Pubs Association (BBPA) there were around 64,000 pubs in 1990 and this has declined to less than 48,000 today. There are loads more places where you can buy a drink but these places aren’t pubs. Part of the increase can be explained by the rules themselves - if you manage a little village hall, you need a premises licence, not so you can turn it into a shebeen, but because the licencing regulations require places offering any form of entertainment to have a premises licence. But there are also a lot of cafés, one estimate suggests approaching 100,000 representing a 60% increase since the 2003 licencing reforms.

Despite the doomsayers, the 2003 reforms to alcohol licensing have correlated with a significant shift in the way we drink. Accelerated by the 2007 smoking ban, the decline in the pub has continued as we opt instead for the altogether less beery and manly concept of the café. Places that once had two or three pubs now have just one (or even none) while new cafés open - even if they’re in the garden centre or the farm shop. The café is more female-friendly (women who would never walk into a pub alone will happily sit in a café) and the increase reflects our strange love affair with coffee, something imported along with stodgy fruit muffins as part of the Starbucks package.

The important change, however, was that cafés began to get a licence to sell alcohol and even to promote this as an offer. At Keelham Farm Shop today the café counter featured a prominent promotion for prosecco and bucks fizz, the little café in our village hall likewise sells prosecco (which tells us something about the market I guess) and most sell bottled beers, even cocktails. We have moved on a long way from the days when the museum café sold you cardboard sandwiches and tea in pots that didn’t pour properly. We now expect, after traipsing round a stately home or meandering through some gardens, that the café not only sells something edible (if overpriced) but also gives us the option of alcohol. Café culture has arrived, just not quite as Tony envisaged.

The expectation back in those Blairite days was that the new cosmopolitan culture would look like a Parisian café with gingham table cloths and surly waiters. We’d look around the tables to see academic sorts urgently debating great issues (while not smoking Gitanes because Blair banned that), elegantly dressed ladies sitting upright reading a serious novel while sipping at a small coffee or some strangely coloured liquid in a tiny glass. At the back there’d be a big table of friends drinking red wine out of what look like tooth glasses while attracting stares from other patrons at their risqué language.

Instead we got the village knitting circle chattering over the clack of their needles. Other tables have the local childminder teaching her charges how to behave in a café and an elderly couple enjoying a cup of coffee and, depending on the time of day, toast, cake or scones. Once a week a bunch of mums (you know they are mums because that’s what they talk about) sit there celebrating Friday with pizza and a glass of fizz. English café culture is, well, English. And, judging by the seemingly endless capacity for new cafés, we are loving it. Ladies will ring up their friends and meet for gossip over coffee or, if the time is right, a glass of rosé. Groups of older men and women with those short-cropped, grey haircuts unique to keen hikers will arrive to fuss over seating while gesticulating with those now essential walking poles as they remove several layers of waterproof clothing. The gents in the party will, seeing a bottle of beer on the drinks menu, relax knowing that they are going to enjoy a pint after all while their wives get the option (“well if you’re having a beer, Gerald…”) of a drink as well.

The intentions of that Blair government have been realised gradually. The results don’t look anything like that supposed continental style that Blairites wanted in their ‘Cool Britannia’, more like the tea tent at the village fair and donkey derby. An altogether better outcome, catering for young and old with things that young and old like - cake, tea and coffee, breakfast sandwiches and the option of a glass of Landlord or one of those little screw top bottles of prosecco (served with a strawberry). Where there’s space a few tables and chairs or a picnic bench is set up outside for those willing to brave the English elements. If you’re in Silsden you can even feed the ducks paddling in the beck while you sip your tea outside the Old Post Office.

This café culture perhaps isn’t a function of those 2003 licencing reforms (they also didn’t create the sort of drunken riots that The Guardian and assorted academic experts predicted) but rather are a reflection of our wider culture, an ageing population, and a larger number of financially independent women. Café culture, at least as it has evolved in England, is much more feminine than the pub and we also see in this culture another shift - the preference for an early night. We, on average, go to bed about half an hour earlier than we did in the 1970s and wake up about 15 minutes later. Lastly, café culture reflects that, despite what those opposed to the 2003 licencing reforms told us, the English drink significantly less than we did in the bad old days before Blair. About a fifth of the population are teetotal and three-quarters of the population drink less than the current 14 unit recommended maximum. If Britain has a booze problem it isn’t much of one.

The English have not replaced going to the pub with staying at home, they have replaced the traditional boozer with restaurants and, increasingly, the café. And that café culture is a day time culture not an evening culture. Inflation and recession aside, the English eat out more than we ever did (one of those things we often praise about Italian or Spanish culture) but prefer informal settings like a café to formal restaurants. What this means for that other great English institution, the pub is for others to speculate but meanwhile lets celebrate an English café culture that looks and feels English rather than a ‘Cool Britannia’ pastiche of French or Italian café culture.