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Lorenzo Marioni, who owns the New Piccadilly Cafe in Denham Street |
Iconic café all set to close over soaring rent charges
End for working man’s favourite as eatery is forced out of business
A LEGENDARY café, famed for its celebrity customers and working man’s roots, will shut up shop at the end of the month.
The New Piccadilly Cafe in Denham Street – a refuge for the likes of 1960s sex symbol Diana Dors, the notorious lover of John Profumo Christine Keeler, Hungarian dissidents, intellectuals and gangsters – has been offering customers a cheap sit-down menu for more than 50 years.
Appeals from the Twentieth Century Society to have the restaurant listed were rejected by English Heritage in 2004 because it was not considered to be of sufficient architectural merit.
Unable to pay Windmill Developments’ annual rent reviews, and awaiting Westminster Council’s verdict on whether plans for a “mixed use” block of shops and bars would go ahead, owner Lorenzo Marioni said he had long expected to leave.
He said: “I will go off into the sunset and not look back.
“I’ll sit on the sofa for a couple of weeks and fill in my crosswords then I’ll come back and sit and get served.”
Mr Marioni, whose father Pietro opened the restaurant in 1951, said the family-run business had been there since the late 19th century.
He said: “I want it to go with me.
“I couldn't have someone else in here with the same furniture.
“Now they are going to knock everything down at least I can say I stayed until the end.”
The council granted planning permission for a mass redevelopment of Ham Yard in 2003 – of which the New Piccadilly is just one property.
The premises will be gutted by September 22 and the restaurant will shut a week before.
Regular customer and author of Classic Cafes, Adrian Maddox, sees the closure of the 1950s-style New Piccadilly, complete with lemon-yellow Formica table tops, a powder pink and chrome coffee machine and booth seating, as a symbol of an increasingly cloned and commercial Britain.
He said: “If it hadn’t been for bars like this there would never have been skiffle and blues… Lennon and McCartney.
“This socio-cultural emblem is going to be lost forever.
“The passing of this place shows Britain at the end of its tether. Lorenzo does not want to be charging £2.50 for a coffee, but his competitors want to charge £5.50.
“He can’t compete with that.” |
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