Café: Husk

A Danish word originally: husk, a remembering or being mindful. The cafe offers various glimpsed memories of its former existences as a chapel for Danish sailors. There's been a church here since the 1890s, the current luxurious sprawl of spaces, however, is the extended form of a postwar structure, the angular brick inner sanctuary, complete with organ and maritime trusses, hosts the gallery space.

The enterprise is invisibly overseen by London City Mission, the spaces are refreshingly devoid of tracts, clutter, or indeed any trace of an agenda beyond excellent coffee hospitably offered. I prodded for a vision statement, a how-would-you-measure-the-success-of-the-exercise. Ally Gordon, artist-in-residence begins to describe Jesus, meeting people in the street ~ that third space of warmer climates. The collection of rooms very successfully plays the informal sprawl, and indeed I chance to bump into not a few Jesuses in my hours spent loitering over my flatwhite.

The spaces are sensitively balanced, allowing a full range of inhabitations, from the roadfront DLR-facing benching, through the uncynical domesticity of armchairs, rugs and bookshelves, right back to a starker co-working hive of skylit industry and artist's studio. Husk has been given the gift of an existing 50s modern structure which allows the relaxed and worn Eamesie furnishings to roam without any sense of affectation. Strip lighting, would be a minor complaint, flattening what could be more intimately light-pooled corners. The thin paper artworks on display compete unsuccessfully with other artefacts, sewing machines, hymn numbers etc.

The sheer volume of space available allows the coffee-as-catalyst mode of missional presence to be worked out to a greater degree than at Wren, Host or Kahaila. The coffeeshop floor is well curated as a safe space, with a gradiation, all manner of ambiguities are accommodated in the roomy front-of-house, which serves as either a buffer for the unwilling or invitation to the willing - inviting a deeper involvement, in the work of the gallery, classrooms and studio out back.

But it is not just volume: the explicit diversity of uses which symbiotically sit alongside mutually reinforcing the other's mission is where the magic happens here. On the one hand, coffee's familiarity gathers a broad audience to an more typically elite class of use the 'art gallery' allowing a license for more ambitiously challenging curation than concern for access might otherwise allow.

While equally in this complementary relationship the transformative mission of art gives to the coffee space a depth and an orientation, comparable to Hive's efforts with local food. Hive being possibly even more successful than Husk in emphasising coffeeshop-as-gateway - a coffee-shop-as-tip-of-the-iceberg mode of mischief.

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I'm still on the lookout for socially provocative experiments using the vehicle of coffee. Do be in touch if you want to chat or have any recommendations ~ London or further afield. 07729056452

huskcoffee.com
@huskcoffee

Café: Iris & June

Victoria as a district is bland done to excess, with ambitions to surpass itself with acres more of angled glass vying for the significance of tedious spectacle. Just back a street from the main mêlée, however, we find Iris & June, named after the proprietor's grandmothers for their giving refuge in this café's small oasis of maternal calm.

Our aeropress comes, a warm vial of silky smokey Ethiopian scented mountain air, perhaps I prefer more fruit in the palate, but it is, nevertheless a subtle distinctive and very enjoyable brew from Ozone. Our flatwhite, is a textbook pleasure. However, what really rocks my universe at this unexpected cafe are the almond croissants, dense muscular pastry tightly coiled about a nutty aggregate core the texture of love, knitted by bees - my hearty congratulations to the Little Bread Pedlars.

The compact space rendered in pallid bleached pine is all of a zen spartan stark scandi, saved from complete anaemia by a dash of Sandows blue on the chisseled flanks of the bare concrete pillars, and quite exquisite architectural floristry ~ a deeply enjoyable pleasure.

A slightly irrelevant note on airconditioning units ~ there is a gap in the market for a ceiling mounted unit which does not anticipate a ceiling-tile surround and so, undressed, feel strung with a collar and bowtie, but no shirt. Perhaps Marzocco could apply themselves to this design problem.

irisandjune.com @IrisandJune1
lbpedlar.com @LBPedlar
ozonecoffee.com @OzoneCoffee

Café: Hive

Housed in a shipping container, Hive runs rugged urgency as an emphatic theme, like a Swiss army knife of social action and versatile goodness, a macchiato on a mission to speak a message that another world is possible. The luxury of zero-ground-rent, and a cornered heterotopic bubble of campus students, is not made an excuse to be less than aggressively ambitious in plans for the radical local economy. Organising students, in my experience, is like herding cats, and Hive have achieved an astonishing broad portfolio: bikeshop, vegbox scheme, farmers market, live music - all vehicles reinforcing the local locality of reinvestment. They grow-their-own, serving as HQ for an eager network of student polytunnelers, herb gardeners and further off-campus, local farmers. Hive is a must-visit to anyone who would know the capacity of coffee to be the catalyst for relocalisation.

Matthew Algie's beans espress a creamy double shot, perfect pitch black. And I try a Feel Good Bakery sandwich for the first time. Masses of flavour, the roasted veg are superlative, zinging and a good texture bedded in smooth rich humous. The packaging has a handmade, handwritten charm, perhaps a heavier belt with letterpressed/diecut logo might raise it above its present sandwich-undergarment feel of unboxed cheeseburger wrapping. This is cosmetic, my chief critique would be the bread, which is underwhelming: it is a very pleasingly soft wholemeal but limply fails to hold the whole. Shop-bought sandwiches go awry on many levels, but they mostly appreciate the importance of the edge, the sculptural cut where the plastic window gives a crisp sectional view of the sandwich's anatomy. Plastic windows we don't need, but this eater wants for a more muscular bread to shoulder the load and contain its valuable cargo in the way mild sourdough might. And at £3.55, it would like to be artisan bread - even conscious that the price is carrying a matching meal within that price for their one-for-one scheme.

@The_Hive_Cafe
@thehivecafe
growhampton.com/hive-cafe

Café: Host

Come as you are, bring yourself, bring your own lunch. Crisp, still, winter light falls on Victorian tiles: noumenal, yet nonchalant, eternal, yet everyday, the air has a meditative quality, dwelling on the gift of entirely ordinary pleasures. An easy rich flat white, with a free, needlessly excellent, chocolate chip cookie ~ just because it's Monday! Moot illustrate that this is the most obvious thing to do with sacred space: give it away, give it away. In this way the life of it is vitalised. The thoughtfully lightweight scattering of chairs is a lesson in loose-fit architecture ~ humble and intuitive.
@hostcafebarista
moot.uk.net/host

Café: Kahaila

It's all about the cake, the succulent density of red velvet is visually magnetic, catching reflected light in its dark window. Kahaila is gracefully reposed on a slightly overloaded street of neon and curry pushers. Within is bare bulbs and weathered wood, it has tropes with the trimmings. Further back inside skylighting and shaker hooks set a tone that airy and pleasingly domestic. It is, however, the heart of Kahaila that compels this diner to return, repeatedly fascinated that it pursues generosity with such emphatic but understated vigour. The landscape of coffee just now is deafeningly Ethical, with attention given largely to the vital, if intangible, origins of the beans and minimising the exploitation involved. Widely underrealised, however, is the social potential for phenomenal good that is untapped in the space, labour, product and culture that the coffeeshop itself involves. Pay a living-wage, sell Luminary's baking, host charities, employ charity workers, give your stuff away. Coffee shops are a vehicle for social change if they want it, through the narrative they tell. Theirs is the zeitgeist, it is theirs for the changing. Coffee punters as I are longing for a story to believe in.

kahaila.com
@KahailaCafe

Café: Monmouth

 It is the grandfather of this third wave coffee malarky, resisting relegation to nostalgia or self-parody, Monmouth continues to champion exceptional coffee with an utterly unflappable dignity. Cast in a more well-resolved mode of post-Victorian attire even than average, the site at Borough is exquisitely suited. Low warm lamps huddle Monmouth devotees, higher up radiant heaters reinforce the temperature - the game here is creating a seamless environment extending all that is ambient, gourmet, buzzing and unpriceably alive from the market into the nooks of this platform for being-in-public-excellently, and there is something lifeaffirming about the lack of glazing. All the rugged fixings carry this same elemental engagement of the senses. Monmouth does the above better than anyone else - the brass taps, enameled tin lamp shades and muchly weathered timbers are invisible here, unironically timeless, accidentally perpetual natural intuitive. Monmouth also achieves the communal table in a way that makes Pain Quot's pale and awkward by comparison. Here I am a guest at a banquet. The effect is electric if perhaps too intimate and yet the self-selecting Monmouth set are here on-display, it is civic theatre and there is a peculiar urban pleasure in basking immersed in the companionship of strangers, osmosing rumours as at a first wave coffee tavern of yesteryear. Finally, there is an infectious barista commeradery, a tangible and unpretentious pleasure in participating in a family of craftspersons. Elsewhere there is craft, but often without warmth. Monmouth is closed on Sundays.. just saying. Magic.

monmouthcoffee.co.uk

Café: Workshop Coffee Co.

Coffee is a psychotropic industrial product and this is the belly of the machine. Familiar and urgent DJ Shadow organ riffs offer a bassy soundtrack, apt: the organic, exquisitely remixed. The maître d does nothing to deflect any possible accusation that Workshop take their beans too seriously. Moody to the point of hysteria, broody ~ many are the stages in the manufacture of mystique. Writ large here is the understanding that coffee is an identity, sworn by and sworn allegiance to. Workshop, most importantly, sells its clientelle an air of connoisseurship and bravery - the adventure of the avant-garde for the early adopters. My aeropressed Kenyan comes to me on a bamboo platter, it is exceptional, multi-dimensioned and lingering. Workshop's harsh filament lights in strung cages cut a crisp edge on everything, and black ducting on a black ceiling hunkers the whole affair into an illicit wallowing - combined, these lights render in chiaroscuro a reverent ambiance suited to the proto-religious devotion and cultic fervour these high priests of coffee trade in.

I would try your patience a little further to explore the spirituality of coffee because at Workshop it is done with such peerless energy and refinement. Coffee is an opiate engendering superhuman lucidity, and it does so in the privacy of your cup, a discrete and personal moment whereby you contract to addle brain chemistry, faithing a surrogate religious experience. To imbibe coffee in your communion is to affect perception and assume a worldview. Understanding coffee religiously offers two further aspects of the cult ~ the attention to origins: single origins, organic origins, this is a cosmology and an ethic - the articulation, through beans, of that crafted and compassionate mode by which we would like the world to have come into being. Out of this genesis we derive a notion that partaking such substances are what make a man clean. That's all I've got for you. Workshop is the purest form of coffee devotional, I recommend them unreservedly. The green living wall at the back is a perfect surprise, exactly the relief to offset all other dark intensity.

workshopcoffee.com
@workshopcoffee

Café: Regency Cafe

The 7am crowd of builders and the SW1 suited queue for the perfect fryup. A majestic simplicity of doing one thing well, relentlessly. For me, perfect eggs topped with perfect Hollandaise, elsewhere someone is having full English chips and beans announces a cockney siren with no graces or affectation, completing aurally the totality of this robustly London theatre of breakfast. Mugs of a black brew from the steamer, on formica tables, beneath gingham curtains. There is nothing twee, everything is tonkable.  A little self-aware, perhaps too self-referential, in its wall hangings, but it has nothing to lose in perpetuating its own mythology. The Regency is king of cooking a tradition that will never grow old.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_Cafe

Café: The Magazine, Serpentine Sackler

A compact display of the many various things I love and hate about Zaha Hadid. The exuberance of geometry is completely breathtaking. It is a whirl in the pleasure of form, and regardless the slaves, interns, robots and oilfields it may have taken to carve this into physicality, I think it is so important that someone out there is being so bold. Architecture, preemptively preoccupied with ethics, production, longevity and stodgy sustainability loses much of its energy to be flamboyant expressive and worth-sustaining. Needless to say, I cannot finally conscion it. The hosepipe fountain (possibly temporary) is straight out of Jacques Tati, knowingly, almost, pronouncing the absurdist overprivileged enterprise it has been coopted to serve. The slick panelised form bellies out the side of the Sackler, bulbous, overinflated, obese. It is gestural, but to the point of flippant contempt, a vomit of CAD. I dislike it conceptually with almost equal force to the affection I have for the swooping joy of the form. The contempt it displays against the trivialities of realisation and maintenance are witnessed where sleek muscular columns run flush into the floor, and minions mopping have slowly stained a fringe of grey. The thin novelty of fleeting fashionability are found also in the bespoke asymmetrical tables with polished dentable scratchable smooth matt finishes - seen collectively they seem to be a recovery group discussing the abuse of their being used at all. My espresso was a tight and tangy shot, made more than merely competent by the singular crockery, cast in the same jaunty squiggle as the mother conch above it. I wish I could give myself permission to praise the cafe without reservation, but the waitering was cool going on cold, as throughout it is coloured by an awareness of its privilege.

serpentinegalleries.org/restaurant

Café: Tea House Theatre

This is a family favourite. This is how to allay fears of the mother-in-law. An oasis of unselfconscious nostalgic frivolity a stones through from Vauxhall's grind. Here, endless variaions of chintzy china tea cups and saucers, hand-knitted tea cosys and glass bell domes constitute some small part of the burgeoning table sets. The Tea House succeeds to be ornate at every angle. This morning, however, it is a calm made conspicuous by its periodic shattering, the DFS ads lilting through from Clasic FM are abrasive at best, jarring against everything that is genteel and sedate in the calm of the cafe, cheapening the whole like claws down a Dutch master of elegant composure. Relatedly, as with Kahaila, the accretion of paper faff, clutter and the cheap printing of the 21st century gnaw the periphery of my oasis of calm: dates, types faces and a riot of urgency thoughtlessly obscure the handpainted signage and painstaking restored window-views, cataracting the eyes to the soul of an otherwise faultless jewel box. The portraits of dogs currently on display are an angelic host of furry joy. The Full English is confident, generous, and jolly as it could be.

teahousetheatre.co.uk
@teahousetheatre