ACE PLACE

Andrew English joins devotees for the latest reunion at London's most prominent motorcycling landmark, the Ace Cafe

- Andrew English

YOU COULD THROW a dart at a calendar blindfold and hit a significant date for the Ace Cafe, 1950s bastion of café racers, prominent landmark on London's hardly picturesque North Circular, and, under the aegis of Mark Wilsmore, a revived and reinvented hub for motorcycle and car fans.

Although The Ace now hosts just about any celebration or vehicle club, many with regular meets, with a history stretching back 87 years it actually predates the current vogue for motors-and-coffee venues by at least 75 years. It was established in 1938 by Hugo 'Vic' Edenborough, who'd seen the beginnings of the roadside café culture in America and who, after starting George's Snack Bar in the East End and then The Halt Café in Hendon with his friend Eustace Fletcher, had made a speculative purchase of the strip of land in Stonebridge between the newly established North Circular Road and the River Brent.

What a place it was, too. With a modern kitchen and 25 staff, The Ace Café served 2000 meals a day around the clock, mainly to lorry drivers grinding their way round the capital on what was then its outer (but is now its inner) ring road. Ironically, while it was surrounded by strategic targets, in 1940 the German Luftwaffe bombers somehow missed the dense industrial estates and railway bridges carrying rail freight cars to all points northwest and hit The Ace. It was swiftly rebuilt, however, and postwar became reinvented as a meeting place for the disaffected youth bored with being told how they didn't win the war, and looking for a bit of fun and a place of their own. 'You want to hit back at all the old geezers who tell us what to do,' said one teenager in Charles Hamblett's and Jane Deverson's 1964 book Generation X, a candid collection of interviews with the postwar baby boomers.