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Today's Special (2004, 9 mins): a series of three shorts about London's disappearing cafes Tea Rooms; Eldon Street; New Piccadilly Filmed and directed by Paul Kelly Produced by Andrew Hinton Edited by Mikey Tomkins Music by Saint Etienne And Ian Catt Sound mix by Daniel Herbert Titles by Rob Jones A CC-Lab production Sonia Mullett Piece Broadcast by Channel 4 over three successive evenings in July 2004 this series of brief films offers a glimpse of London's threatened outposts of independent dining and drinking – the cafés and coffee shops of the mid-20th century. Sandwiched between shots of the capital’s more celebrated sights – the British Museum ('Tea Rooms'), the 'Gherkin' ('Eldon Street') and the Eros statue of Piccadilly Circus ('New Piccadilly') – the establishments profiled in Today’s Special have all since shut up shop: the Tea Rooms, Copper Grill and Piccolo Sandwich Bar in 2004 and New Piccadilly hanging on till September 2007. Paul Kelly's beautifully reflective and witty camerawork - with its echoes of Finisterre - works like a still life, playing on the mortality present in period fixtures. This is most evident in 'Tea Rooms': a loving study of the Corsini's cafe on Museum Street, which opened in 1960. As Mrs Corsini reflects on her retirement we see an empty menu board, an abandoned spider's web and safety stickers peeling from the equipment they once vouched for. An earlier section juxtaposes the characterful signs of independent cafes with the brash modern frontage of ubiquitous high-street coffee chains, revealing – in the half of the corporate branding we see on screen (BUCKS, COST) – the root cause of the Tea Rooms' (and others like it) closure. The Copper Grill and Piccolo Sandwich Bar of the second film 'Eldon Street' are, just as New Piccadilly in the third, victims of London’s ever-changing built environment. The proprietor of the Piccolo Sandwich Bar sums it up – 'we've asked if we could come back. They've said we could try but during that conversation they did mention Sainsbury's about ten times'. The Soho site that formerly housed New Piccadilly is, at time of writing, under the management of Firmdale Hotels Plc - the original building has been pulled down and replaced. Decked out in the colours of the Festival of Britain, New Piccadilly's prices matched its original 1950s décor and its fate provides an interesting contrast to the restored Royal Festival Hall in This is Tomorrow. |