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The London Coffee Bars of the 1950s – teenage occupation of an amateur space?

This published paper, ‘The London Coffee Bar of the 1950s - teenage occupation of an amateur space?’ presented at the OCCUPATION: Negotiations With Constructed Space Conference at the University of Brighton (2-4 July, 2009, http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/office-for-spatial-research/news-and-events/occupation) challenged received descriptions of this area of design history that is frequently mentioned in academic discussions of the 1950s. As part of the conference aim of opening up questions about the relationship between people and constructed space through explorations of the frictions and negotiations underlying forms of inhabitation, Partington’s paper invokes Andrew Jackson’s critique of the modernist position of the universal meaning of an object, with its contention that the act of consumption is a key determinant of meaning.

Thus the paper argued that the stereotype of a homogeneous, generic, coffee bar should be replaced by an appreciation of the heterogeneity of ‘coffee bars’, both in terms of their design, but, more significantly, in the range of their clientele and designers. Whereas contemporary and later writers described these bars as teenage spaces, they functioned rather as spaces whose inhabitation changed throughout the day, depending on audience, time of day or night and location. Often designed by amateurs, their degree of success was partly attributable to the disinclination of architects to work on them. The paper also demonstrated the extent to which interior design in the 1950s was seen as of secondary importance to the architectural façade of a building.

The paper was published as part of the conference proceedings in Meade, Diaz and Cruz (eds), OCCUPATION: Negotiations With Constructed Space (University of Brighton, 2013).