Where Did the Café Obsession Come From? A Short History of the Café Ride

Here’s a question that’s bothered us on more than one climb. Why do cyclists plan the whole ride around the stop?

Nobody does this with running. Nobody finishes a swim and says “right, where’s the good flapjack?” But ask a group of riders what they’re doing on Sunday and the answer is never a distance or a route. It’s a place. “Meeting at nine, heading for the café at Bovey.” The ride is just the bit in the middle.

We assumed this was some modern thing, brought on by Instagram and a decent flat white. It turns out we’re nearly 150 years late to the party.

It started with a shortage of anywhere to eat

Picture the 1870s and 80s. The safety bicycle is arriving, ordinary people can suddenly cover thirty miles in a day, and there’s a very practical problem: nowhere is set up for them. Roadside inns are used to coaches and carts. A muddy man on a bicycle asking for a hot meal and a bed is, to put it politely, not what they planned for.

So cyclists organised. The Bicycle Touring Club was founded in 1878 (it became the Cyclists’ Touring Club a few years later), and one of the first things it did was sort out where its members could actually eat and sleep. By 1881 its founder, Stanley Cotterell, had nearly 800 establishments under contract. From 1888 the club started putting up cast-iron winged wheel signs on the walls of the ones that welcomed riders, which is basically the original “cyclists welcome” sticker in the window.

That’s a lovely thing to realise. The very first organised cycling clubs in Britain were, in part, a restaurant guide.

Then the tea rooms took over

By the 1880s and 90s, tea rooms were popping up all over the country, and plenty of them were aimed squarely at cyclists. Cottage gardeners in the countryside put out a few tables and sold tea and home-baked cake to anyone who turned up on two wheels. The Orchard Tea Gardens at Grantchester is the famous example: a group of Cambridge students asked to have their tea under the apple trees in 1897, and they cycled, rowed or walked out there for it.

By the 1930s it was a full-blown tradition. The great cycling writer Kuklos wrote in 1935 about being tempted to an early tea by a cottage near Surfleet in Lincolnshire, spotted because it had the winged wheel on the wall. A farming couple’s front room, serving tea to passing cyclists. That’s the café stop, and it was already well established when he wrote it down.

Some of those places never stopped. The Eureka café on the Wirral has been a hub for local club riders since 1928 and still draws a crowd of cyclists on a Sunday morning. Nearly a hundred years of the same Sunday.

Meanwhile, on the continent: espresso

Over in Europe the story took a different flavour. In France and Belgium the café was where the club met before the ride, the place you gathered, argued about the route and had a small, strong coffee before heading out. In Italy it went a step further and coffee became part of the sport itself.

You’ll hear a famous story about Fausto Coppi stopping for a coffee during Milan-San Remo and still winning by a huge margin. We’d love for it to be true. The honest answer is that it’s a legend with several versions and nobody seems able to pin down the details, so we’ll file it under “too good to check”. What isn’t in doubt is that Coppi and Bartali were known for their espresso, and that coffee and racing were tangled together by the 1950s. By 1956 an espresso machine maker, Faema, had a pro team. Eddy Merckx later rode for them.

Which tells you something. By the middle of the last century, coffee wasn’t a treat for cyclists. It was part of the kit.

The modern bit

After a long stretch where the café ride just carried on quietly being the café ride, something shifted in the 2000s. A new generation of cycling cafés appeared that were as much bike shop as coffee shop. Look Mum No Hands! opened on Old Street in London in 2010, with a workshop, a decent espresso machine and a lot of people in cleats. Brands followed, with Rapha opening its first clubhouses in the early 2010s and building a whole identity around the ride, the stop and the coffee.

It would be easy to be sniffy about that. We’re not. A lot of it is the same instinct the Victorians had: riders need somewhere that’s pleased to see them.

So why does it stick?

We reckon there’s a plain reason, underneath all the history.

A ride is hard to share. You’re strung out in a line, breathing too hard to talk, watching someone’s rear wheel. The café is where you actually get to be a group. It’s where the mate who got dropped catches up and gets a round of applause for it, where the route gets rewritten, where someone says “same again next week?” and everyone says yes. As one rider put it in Cycling UK’s magazine, cafés are “the pegs on which to hang a ride”. Take them away and a circular ride feels empty.

It’s also an excuse, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Nobody needs a reason to ride sixty miles on a Sunday, but a slice of cake at the halfway mark makes it easier to say out loud.

For us it was never complicated. It’s exactly how the two of us rode as kids and it’s why Cycle Bros exists. The stop became the whole point and the ride was how you earned it. Turns out we’re in very good company: nearly 150 years of it.

Where to go next

If this has made you hungry, we’ve been collecting our favourite cycling cafés across Devon, all ridden and rated by us, with more on the way. And if you’d like to ride to one with company, come out with us. Sociable pace, and we promise the stop is never skipped.

— John & Rich