Farewell Piccadilly

The New Piccadilly Cafe was my favourite London caff, a place Rapier Colin Pryce-Jones felt intuitively at home, a place where time seemed to stand still, the calendar perpetually 1959.

Sadly, last call for this venerable Soho institution came late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Blame progress, blame developers, blame fast food nation.

Commented observer Mark Fitchett on the Girl in the Cafe blog:

"You know even at 11:45 people were waiting in a queue to say goodbye. By the time I came back at 1 pm the place was packed and full of such happy sounds. People had brought bottles of wine and were just sitting, talking, jumping from one table to another to meet up with friends old and new. I stood and watched the queue: people whose first journey here had been as a result of reading of its closure and older people who must have grown up with this place a fixture in their lives. I guess we always thought it would be there, trapped in time and comforting as all around us there was change and rush.

"Inside people walked around with video cameras trying to capture every last moment of the cafe and the staff began to buckle with the number of orders.

"I took my bill and went to the till to say good bye to [owner] Lorenzo [Marioni] and walked away from a piece of my past…"

Gracing this post are photos Mark took on the New Picc's last day of service.

Comments

[Ingrid]

I passed The Cafe yesterday and it is completely gone, vanished from the face of the earth.

[Greg Ogarrio]

God, that hurts. Like it was never there. But I know better.