| Located just off New Oxford St close-by
The British Museum, this parlour-style cafe looks like a red-formica
refugee camp for Pinter stage loners. Or some staging post in
the old 60s UK socio-mondo documentary 'The London That Nobody
Knows'. The elderly male clientele seem to have been regulars
for nigh on half a century and the sense of lives solidified
into defeat is palpable. A kind old couple attend to their flock
from a tiny, pre-retro serving area that steams and spits with
chip fat and spilt teas. The extreme spartan beauty of the wall-to-wall
laminate is an acquired taste but for the unprepared, the lingering
air of inertia, lost souls and weary despair may be hard to stomach.
For classic cafes diehards however, this visceral display of
raw, kitchen-sink existence at the end of its tether will be
bracing. Nuggets of sociological detail abound... conversations
prompted by tabloid headlines fizzle out as the regulars sift
through the small change of lives made moribund by decades of
social marginalization. Apart from visiting post-office workers
(soon to be lost souls themselves as vast Consignia cuts are
signaled for the Spring of 2002), the murmurs of endless, ossified
mornings and long, atrophied afternoons haunt the wooden Victorian
booths and exquisitely sad sauce-smeared tables. The Tea Rooms
shows Britain doing what it has done best for a century - blanching
the life from a working populace raw from generations of managed
decline. No exaggeration to say that, even in the noxious afterchill
of Cool Britannia, Orwell would have felt immediately at home
here. Down and out indeed. |
