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Your Cappuccino Moment
August 31, 2006
Original The London Times article→
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Local people are resisting the arrival of Starbucks in Lamb’s Conduit St, which, in the past decade or so, has gone from inner-city mess to urban chic. Because the street in Bloomsbury now has not just a lot of small independent shops but a lot of big famous people living nearby, the protest is getting plenty of media attention.
Times Online
Your Cappuccino Moment
Starbucks is now the most accurate litmus test today for where the city is gentrifying fastest
by Vanora Bennett
August 25, 2006
Local people are resisting the arrival of Starbucks in Lamb’s Conduit St, which, in the past decade or so, has gone from inner-city mess to urban chic. Because the street in Bloomsbury now has not just a lot of small independent shops but a lot of big famous people living nearby, the protest is getting plenty of media attention.
The most recent protester is comedian Alexei Sayle, who promised to boycott the new Bloomsbury branch. He called Starbucks a “faceless bully” and said it “gobbled up everything in sight” at the expense of small independent traders.
He was preceded by actor Rupert Everett, who said recently that “Starbucks is spreading like a cancer. Nobody in the neighbourhood wants it, including me. There are plenty of diners and coffee shops there already.”
The outraged locals are getting up an anti-Starbucks petition which already has more than 1,000 signatures.
The street’s owner, Rugby School, has meanwhile adopted a posture of injured innocence, protesting that Starbucks is a good rent-payer and it’s in the street’s interests to welcome the chain in. But I’d say the high-profile protesters might yet win. Residents of Primrose Hill, Camden’s film-star zone, fought the same fight a couple of years ago and managed to beat off the American intruder without all that much trouble.
Behind the battle, we’re seeing something else rear its head - an interesting manifestation of urban collective psychology.
For people who live in posh bits of town, Starbucks clearly represents something bad - the new Macdonalds; a bit of low-rent grot they don’t want cluttering up their high street.
They don’t want global coffee in a plastic bucket with a logo all over the side. They’re too smart - they want the sleek sophistication of Bar Italia, in Soho, and they’re prepared to fight a style intifada to keep the invader out.
Yet these outbreaks of Starbucks hatred are far from being universal.
For everyone in scruffier bits of town, the chain marketing expensive froth in plastic buckets still signifies a level of comfort and style that you can only wish your neighbourhood would achieve.
If you were living in Dalston, say, you might get quite excited if a Starbucks opened near you. I live in Camden, just like Rupert Everett, but in one of the remoter, scruffier fastnesses of the place. In my neck of the woods, Kentish Town, where the high street is full of pound stores and terrible faux-Italian cafés in which the blonde Belarussian immigrant waitresses look in bewilderment at the cappuccino machine and end up giving you coffee that comes slowly and is almost entirely froth-free, we certainly dream of the high street getting smart enough to attract a Starbucks.
If our Starbucks dream would only come true, I’m sure most of the residents of Kentish Town would also be delighted if only Rupert Everett or Alexei Sayle would honour us with their presence for a protest sit-in outside it. They’d be trying to get our signatures for their anti-Starbucks petition; but we, naïve, hopeless, adoring, have-nots, would be desperate for their signatures in our autograph book.
Two sides of a deep, deep divide, then. It looks as though Londoners’ polarized feelings about Starbucks have made it, not just a brand of coffee, but the most accurate litmus test today for where the city is gentrifying fastest.
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