Fountains Cafe and Grill - Bradford
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Well, dear reader, May is upon us, and after some CafWalk silence in April due to being so busy I barely even thought of an egg or a chip, I am back, and this time I am recounting a recent trip to Fountains in Bradford. (xoxo café person)
Bradford is one of my favourite cities in the UK, mostly because it is home to the finest museum in the country, or maybe even the world(!), the National Science and Media Museum (formerly known as the Bradford Museum of Film and Photography), a hotbed for British nostalgia with exhibitions on old adverts, animations and real-life TV ephemera such as the wombles themselves(TINY), and real life Gordon the gopher(ABOUT THE SIZE YOU MIGHT EXPECT). Most of my exposure to Bradford has taken place inside of this museum, but back in March, on my way to Wakefield to see my best friend for her birthday, I decided to take a speed-detour to Bradford to visit Fountains, a café very high on my visitation wish list. It was a quick turnaround, and so the walk part was brief, but I felt that this time-sensitive visit was worth doing in a hurry as I had recently heard that the Oastler shopping centre that this café is a part of to is set to be demolished in the next year or so, so I figured better to visit quickly to seal the deal of having been there and then return for a more leisurely breakfast there in the future.
After a 7am coach followed by a train, I arrived bleary eyed and a bit damp(it was raining) outside of Fountains at about 11am after a brief walk through Bradford admiring old shop fronts and beautiful buildings.
Fountains was bustling inside with absolutely no tables available so I spent a little while mooching around a great nearby vintage shop that had taken a place in the shopping centre as a meanwhile space.(Meanwhile spaces are spaces which are rented out to smaller businesses and organisations to fill the time often before demolition or regeneration, a lot of the arts rely on these spaces as they are affordable, but they do mean there is always a sense of precarity in the air). I get chatting to the person who owns the vintage shop, who is really nice, we have a great chat about moving back to the North after living in London and she also gives me a few pointers for more old cafes in bradford(there’s quite a few, maybe most in one place that I’ve visited so far). I buy a 1960s cookbook that used to belong to an all-girls-school library and head back to the café, which is decidedly more quiet, and I take a seat by the window, in the middle so I can experience the café in panorama.
The outside of the Café is the most beautiful one I have seen yet, a real jamboree of mid-century typography and orange and blue plastic, and inside is decidedly more brown(my favourite colour) with wood panelling, brown formica tables, and brown leather chairs. There are some spectacular original fixtures and fittings inside including a flat concrete-relief wall-lamp-thing which is beautiful, and a huge painting of a fountain. There are some stairs which go up into a door, which is closed, and above this there is an “insect-o-cutor", presumably to kill flies, a most excellent name for an insect-killing robot.
I ordered an egg on toast with a cup of tea, which is one of my regular orders at a café, it was really nice, as egg on toast with a cup of tea always is. I sat, without my headphones(one of my cafwalk rules) and listened to the sounds of people chatting, a really good place.
I didn’t stay too long as I was off to get the train to see my best friend, so once I finished eating I left, taking a quick detour through Bradford’s Kirkgate market, where I counted not one, not two, but THREE old cafes, perhaps more of the 1970s-1980s persuasion. Sadly this indoor market, which is a gem of 1970s concrete beauty, complete with abundant concrete waffle-slab(yes that is what it’s called and it is the best mid-century texture thank you) lots of beautiful tiles and, most exciting of all, William Mitchell concrete Murals.
I didn’t have much time so I am hoping for a return visit soon, where I will go to all of the cafes and take a better look at the murals, but I am sad to report that this market, too, has been earmarked for regeneration, so I would recommend to anyone to go to Bradford as soon as you can to experience all of this wonder; go to the museum, too, make a day of it!
When places such as Fountains shut down it is usually because of one of two reasons: retirement within a family business where nobody is able to take it on, or regeneration of areas leading to demolition. It is often the case that when people think of older un-renovated spaces, especially in the North where due to class the mythology of older places is imbalanced, the words which may come up as descriptors may be ones such as “outdated” or “unloved”. I have at this point spent a lot of time seeking out and visiting these cafes across the UK, and I haven’t yet visited one which isn’t really busy and cherished by its local community. Each of these cafes has its own history spanning decades and regulars to whom these spaces have consistently been an integral part of the fabric of their daily communal lives. I always attend these places as a guest, which I am conscious of, but there is consistently a sense that the people who work there know the people who eat there very well and this has been the case for years. I have experienced a sense of belonging like this inside places like this in my own life, and I fear that it may be something really important that is vanishing due to societal and structural change. I deeply fear that we may lose this sense of communality and continuity within public eating and drinking spaces as now, however good they may be, they often tend to feel more temporary and shifting. Perhaps this is a pessimistic thing to think and it’s just more difficult to recognise an institution in its infancy stages, but I also wonder if the pace of life being dictated by capitalism, growth and constant novelty means that this almost Trumpton/Model village-esque idea of a place where there is a café and a greengrocers and a florist/butchers/cobblers/etc where everyone goes is becoming obsolete. Of course, things must and do change through time, and I often wonder why I resist this to the extent that I do, but its often hard to ignore the dystopic rumblings of late-capitalism shifting the structures of what we are used to. The only spaces which exist now without being built on the expectation that you would spend money are libraries and some museums and galleries. The cafes I write about in this newsletter are often incredibly cheap in comparison to anywhere else, and this makes it possible to exist in a public space and rest for a while without spending a lot of money. There is certainly a wider sense of homogenisation in terms of leisure and eating, a change which has felt palpable within my lifetime, or even the last decade, which I imagine makes it harder for the social insitutions of the future to take root. Interestingly, I have noticed we are in a moment where everything is artisan to the extreme, and often drenched in branding thus becoming signifiers of status as well as simply being the food that we eat. Of course, food has always symbolised class and this is nothing entirely new but the way in which we share our lives publicly may mean we are experiencing this through a megaphone. We are living in delicious/expensive/confusing times, and I wonder where this structure might take us in the future. My mind is always swimming with thoughts about this and not really answers, but what I DO I know that there’s nothing much more life affirming and punk than sharing and participating in community meals, and I recommend looking into the work of The National Food Service, and trying to read their Community Cooks Handbook, which is excellent. And, of course, The Magic Hat Cafe if you live in Newcastle operates on a Pay As You Feel basis on the weekends, and intercepts food waste, and is really delicious, a model of what I hope the future looks more like.
Thank you for reading this dispatch, I am very aware this one has been discourse-heavy and description-light and by way of trying to provide some balance I would like to share this set of three films about disappearing cafes in London made by director Paul Kelly, all available on youtube and really worth watching, including the most mythologised extinct formica insitution in London, The New Piccaddilly. You can find the first of the three here and click through for the other two.