London’s oldest biker café keeps closing because of... bikers

A proper biker is someone “whose deodorant is WD-40”, with oil stains on their hands, who smells of old leather and “just wants a ride and not to be a dick”. At least that’s how Bubblez the Biker, a regular at London’s legendary Ace Cafe, describes it. 

In his view, the youngsters who have begun congregating outside the Wembley biker café on Friday nights, performing wheelies and burnouts, are anything but proper bikers. They’re rats, “fucking melts” and sausages, some riding whiney small-motored machines Bubblez derides as “like a disability car”. His language may be colourful but it shows how angry he is at their behaviour, and what they threaten. Since the summer, their antics have forced Ace Cafe to close early on Friday nights, costing the business tens of thousands of pounds.

Venture onto social media and you can see the spectacle for yourself. Crowds line Beresford Avenue, filming motorcyclists perform wheelies and other stunts on the busy public road. Some ride perilously close behind enormous Royal Mail lorries heading for the nearby sorting office, while families try to get home through the rush-hour traffic. At least one video shows a rider colliding with a pedestrian who was attempting to cross the road. The noise is tremendous. 

The Ace Cafe that features in the background of these clips is no ordinary café. When it opened near Wembley in 1938, it stood in an industrial landscape of railway sidings, warehouses and the working Grand Union Canal, just off the North Circular. In the post-war years it became the spiritual home of Britain’s Ton-Up Boys and Rockers, leather-jacketed young men with money to spend on motorcycles and rock and roll. Their rivalry with the scooter-riding Mods helped provoke a national moral panic, culminating in the notorious seaside clashes of 1964. The Ace still displays newspaper cuttings and even a deckchair commemorating the Battle of Brighton.

There’s some irony then that, with this history of rebellion and youth culture, the stunts of today’s motorheads are threatening the café’s future. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been venturing out to the establishment to understand more about what’s going on. And to my surprise, I learned this is not the first time that something like this has happened.