Culture Club

Every biker worth his salt would have at some point heard of the Ace Café. Having been there and spent some time there I can tell you that from a sheer glam perspective, this old school café on London’s North Circular Road is quite unremarkable. No fancy baristas, no posh decorations and certainly not the kind of place where you’d take the miss (or missus) on a coffee date. Yet, Ace Café is legend. You see, back in the mid- to late 1950s, this transport café with its huge parking lot located on the high-speed North Circular Road, and others like it, played host to one of the most enduring motorcycle sub-cultures of all time- the Rockers.  Although the connection is rarely made, the Rockers were a product of a general rise in prosperity among the British working class in the aftermath of the Second World War combined with the peaking of the British motorcycle manufacturing industry. The prologue to the Rockers story however starts farther back in time and virtually all leads point to a single character in British war history. Thomas Edward Lawrence may be listed as a British archaeologist by the know-it-all Wikipedia, but you’d probably recognise