Café grub protest begins

Is the traditional cafe under threat?

A performance artist begins a protest in support of the traditional café on Friday by spending a fortnight sitting in a bath of baked beans.

Mark McGowan's stunts have included pushing a nut seven miles with his nose to protest against student debt and rolling four miles on a pavement to encourage politeness towards office cleaners.

He plans to spend eight hours a day from 14 to 26 November sitting in the bean bath with sausages strapped to his head at the House Gallery in Camberwell, south London.

He said he came up with the idea for the installation, called 'Sausage, Chips and Beans', after a foreign friend complained about a pub's "everything with chips and beans" menu.

"Potatoes have got a lot of potassium, beans have lots of fibre and meat is full of protein," he said.

These places are vanishing week by week Adrian Maddox, author

"And we don't need to shut down our cafes and swap them for more coffee shops."

He is not alone in taking up the fight to keep London's traditional cafes.

This year the Sausage and Mash restaurant chain reopened Alfredo's - an Italian-run café in Islington which had been boarded up since 2000.

"People need to be a lot more active in trying to preserve what is an important part of our social heritage," said Kevin Finch, from the Sausage and Mash group.

Pace of change

And Adrian Maddox, who wrote the book Classic Cafes, would like to see some of the buildings listed.

"It's like Betjeman's battle in the early 20th Century to get Victorian architecture taken account of," he said.

"The pace of change has escalated massively.

"These places are vanishing week by week and day by day as the big corporate coffee giants just move in and turn all British high streets into huge branded malls."