Classic Cafes Adrian Maddox Black Dog, 176pp, £19.95 ISBN 190103383X

The other day, I was in Katz's Deli on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It's one of the best-known diners in the city. As one of the few surviving Jewish eateries in an area that was once packed with them, it acts as a magnet for heritage-seekers. The walls are lined with photos - of mayors, baseball stars, Bill Clinton. It was here that Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. And it was here that I came across Sara Cox of BBC Radio 1 broadcasting her show live to the UK. As I tucked into my spinach knish and listened to her whoop and big up the place, I tried to imagine the DJ doing an open broadcast from a greasy spoon down Whitechapel Road.

Few people these days champion English cafes. They conjure up images of cracked mugs and failure, sausages with the tex-ture of sodden bath rugs, bacon bubbling like offshore oil slicks. Raymond Blanc has argued that the British hate food because "you think it's fantastic to go into some revolting cafe and eat something disgusting to endorse your working-class status". However, increasingly, these cafes are closing down and being replaced by brasseries and identikit coffee houses owned by American chains.

Adrian Maddox, the author of Classic Cafes, sees this creeping homogeneity as a quiet tragedy. He has produced a thinking person's coffee-table book, packed with atmospheric photographs by Phil Nicholls. Starting from the premise that "a proper classic cafe needs to have been left well alone for the past 50 years or so to facilitate that signature feeling of crushed romance and brief escape", he evokes a fading world of Pyrex cup'n'saucer sets, vinyl-topped tables, Gaggia machines, Vitrolite ceilings.

There was a time when Formica cafes represented a future as glinting and accelerated as the Skylon. They were sleek and Euro-glam, an escape from drab, austere England. They were also an antidote to old-fashioned tearooms with their prim waitresses and polite sandwiches. Their interiors sparkled with design motifs such as starbursts, sputniks and boomerangs, conveying the impression of "energy caught in the act of explosive release, like a coruscating diamond".

No wonder they attracted bored, insurgent teenagers, many of whom cultivated identities based on cultural interests rather than class: skiffle, jazz, mod, rock'n'roll. They cropped up repeatedly in pulp cinema of the period - The Golden Disc (1958), Serious Charge (1959), She Knows, Y'Know (1961) - and attracted the invective of such commentators as Richard Hoggart, who saw espresso bars as "spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk".

The coffee houses of the 17th and 18th centuries had been hubs for doctors and commodity brokers, hang-outs for that merchant class which profited from the empire, "penny universities" whose customers were at the centre of the English Enlightenment. Maddox makes the case for seeing the cafes of the 1950s and 1960s as salons for a new, de-industrialised, post-imperial Britain, catering - literally - for artists, designers, the tribes of urban pop culture. Quoting such loafers and bohos as Frank Norman, John Bratby and B S Johnson, he views these cafes not as places where ideas were hatched, but as hallowed zones in which the dynamics and cross-currents of city life could be tapped into.

Wandering through the side streets of London, hunting for cafes that have resisted sunny-side-up gentrification, he recalls the "third place" philosophy of Ray Oldenburg, a thinker who championed neutral areas between home and work, "restorative oases" that are private yet social, discreet yet visible. He cites the psychogeographers Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home and David Seabrook, who have discussed the importance of cafes for modern-day schemers and dreamers, those who still believe there's a space for urban drifting in an increasingly airbrushed, global metropolis.

By default, Maddox has written a history of immigrant labour. Many of the cafes he praises were family businesses opened and staffed by Italians. The second or third generation's reluctance to work long hours means that few survive. Yet new cafes, shabbier perhaps, open all the time. On the edges of London, in those neighbourhoods not yet wholly colonised by shaggy-haired hipsters, cafes run by recently arrived Turks, Ethiopians and Lithuanians are continually springing up. Here, the poor and the friendless come to swap gossip, find out about odd jobs, talk of politics back home, plot some dodgy scam, feel less lonely. Maybe, one day, some of these will be held up as classic cafes, too.

Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city (HarperCollins)

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