Caffeine Fix, Tim Dawson (2010)
Original article first publshed in The Sunday Times on 27 June 2010
Sitting in a sunny courtyard, sipping espresso and watching Simon Humpheson mending a puncture, I find it impossible not to wonder why it’s taken so long for the idea of combining a coffee bar with a bike workshop to take root.
The concept is simple enough. Look Mum No Hands is a cafe-bar with plenty of secure, off-street cycle parking and a bike workshop where staff will undertake minor works on your cycle while you refuel on coffee and cakes. From the ceiling of the central London premises hang rather nice cycling paraphernalia — wooden sprint rims, a classic Italian frame and some groovy utility bikes — and there is a big screen showing non-stop cycle racing.
Humpheson and his two business partners are all keen cyclists and set out to create the kind of place that they wanted to hang out in. With backgrounds in cycle mechanics, restaurant management and finance, they had good reason for thinking that they could make the formula work.
“I just love the atmosphere here when the big races are on,” Humpheson says. “We have been getting a bigger and bigger crowd of regulars in during the Giro d’Italia, so heaven knows what it will be like for the Tour de France.”
Humpheson is not alone — similar establishments are popping up all over the place. Lock 7 in east London has offered a similar mix for the past couple of years, while, just down the road, Viewtube in Stratford combines a cafe with cycle hire and a viewing platform to see the emerging Olympic park.
And it’s not just in London that the cafe-workshop has become fashionable. Mud Dock, in Bristol, combines an upmarket mountain bike shop and workshop on its dockside ground floor and a cafe bar upstairs overlooking the city’s waterfront. It’s been around for a while but it’s now firmly established as a pit stop for any cyclist in need of rest or repairs, or both. And in Pitlochry, Perthshire, Escape Route installed an espresso machine almost a decade ago so that customers could obtain legal stimulation before they took to the surrounding mountains.
It is all a welcome change from the days of hunting around for somewhere to chain your bike while you sought out a cup of tea.
I can’t help but notice that the springing-up of cafeworkshops has happened at the same time as pubs have been closing and big chains of coffee shops such as Starbucks have been scaling back the number of branches. Could it be a reflection of more active lifestyles? Reading the newspapers and chatting to friends over a coffee is delightful but it’s even better if you know that you’ve earned a sit-down. And there’s plenty of growth potential. If I were an investor, I would be looking seriously at the opportunities for opening a chain of cafe-workshops with wi-fi hotspots. Of course, I’m slightly biased.
At these cafes I can file copy to The Sunday Times on my laptop, order another coffee, get my bike serviced, commune with other “home” workers and never have to go to the office. My only worry is that the cakes will get the better of me. It’s always a treat to have your bike tuned up by a professional, but succumb to too many calorific temptations and mechanical benefits achieved in the workshop will quickly be outweighed by extra baggage.
TD June 10