Is it ok to work all day in a café or are you spoiling the vibe and harming the business?
Words: Ella Katz
Images: Lauren Miller
Standing awkwardly between tables, holding our Americanos and a slice of cherry and chocolate cake, we looked for a table. It was a Wednesday morning, and my friend and I had ducked into Lumberjack cafe in Camberwell for coffee before a rental inspection. Only, every single table was occupied, and all by the same composition: one person + one laptop.
Some had headphones on, others even sat on Microsoft Teams calls, speaking softly in corporate babble. None looked up to offer a table. Crumby plates and empty coffee cups sat cast aside and long forgotten, as if they had been the ticket to the event, not the event itself.
When exactly, I wondered, had cafés become the office of choice? And between the screech of the milk steamer and the humming Massive Attack album, are cafés really a good place to work? Or perhaps the better question: is work a good thing to bring into a café?
“People have come downstairs before and said, ‘It feels like a library in here.’ We don’t want it to feel like that; we want it to be warm and welcoming,” says Steve Reynolds, a manager at Lumberjack.
It’s a light-filled space, with a wall-to-ceiling window looking out onto Peckham Road. Opposite the hard-working Italian espresso machine is a spiral staircase that winds underground to a cosy seating section. The ceiling is low downstairs, with exposed pipes snaking through the beams and brick walls. There are three large communal tables – one circular, the other rectangular, and one long and narrow, nesting against the wall. Smaller two-seater tables are scattered around.
It’s an attractive place to set up for the day. There are plenty of power sockets and a free Wi-Fi password hangs on the wall for all to use, so there’s no need to bother a barista mid-cortado.
When it opened in 2016, it was one of the only sit-in cafes in Camberwell. “Previously, cafes in the area have been takeaway only, so we’ve got a bit of a legacy,” Steve says.
“Obviously we value people being in the space and it’s nice that people come and use it, but there’s a constant tension between people who want to come in and work and people who want to enjoy it,” he explains. It’s a tension many of London’s cafes are feeling now.
Laptop users tend to order only one or two small things. Compared to leisurely lunchers, who may order a full meal, they spend less and occupy tables for longer.
For Lumberjack café, a social enterprise that hires and trains 16–25-year-olds who may not otherwise find employment, the ‘officisation’ of their space has made it difficult to offset higher overheads.
But for other cafes in the area, it can be hard to draw a straight line between the proliferation of laptop users and lower revenue. A 2023 survey found that 63% of UK consumers have reduced their spending on dining out, suggesting that cafes are drawing smaller crowds of diners anyway.
Steve says he’d rather have “laptoppers” enjoying the space than no one at all, but it becomes tricky when they need to turn over tables. He asks customers to “be aware that we are a functioning business. Thinking about what seems fair, how you fill the space. If it gets busy, maybe it’s time for me to go.”
Oscar Doughty was a supervisor at Peckham’s Black Bird Bakery until recently. Most weekday customers were commuters ordering takeaways, so he never minded people sitting in and using their laptops.
“They know it’s a bit controversial to be on their laptops so they’re more apologetic, more accommodating… They tend to be younger people too, probably between 25 and 35,” Oscar says.
This comes as no surprise—many of my friends in their 20s and 30s work fragmented weeks. In a post-Covid, casualised workforce tends to be part-time this and freelance that. Or full-time, but remote 2-3 days a week. As a result, the boundaries around leisure time are blurring, as are those around leisure space. Every minute is mined for email answering, and every place is a potential office – be it home, the tube or Tesco’s checkout.
“You’re essentially getting an office for the day for four pounds. We have a big table that would seat eight people on it, it becomes almost a hot desk,” Oscar says.
And in a city where many young people share flats with little to no communal space, cafes seem to be a non-negotiable in maintaining sanity in an otherwise rudderless work-from-home reality. And if not cafes, where can the remote workers go?
Anita Callum, whose name has been changed, is an account manager. She sits at the rectangular communal table at Lumberjack, using her laptop and headphones.
“When you’re a uni student, there’s a lot of libraries you can go to. But once you’re working full-time, there are limited spaces in London,” she says. “It’s about romanticising your life a little bit, right? It doesn’t make sense to just sit in your flat if you have the privilege of being in a city like London,” Anita says.
Next to her sits Ro Rawat, a website writer for the Natural History Museum. They do not know each other.
Ro is a regular at Lumberjack, and they come in on their work-from-home days to avoid getting distracted at home. “I think there is this weird maths that you do in your head of how many hours you’re here versus how much you’re going to spend,” Ro says. “It’s important to me to not take the piss and still have a nice chat with everyone who works here.”
Some cafes have developed and implemented laptop policies with varying degrees of severity.
“We’re supposed to have a laptop policy of an hour, but if it’s not busy, we will let it go for two or three,” says Christos Johnson, a barista at IRENE bakery in Camberwell. At Lumberjack, there are small wooden signs that read, “No laptop tables.” They’re placed around half of the tables, usually smaller ones, to reserve space for people who want to sit and have a coffee together.
“The other day, there were three signs and people all moved them to the same table, and there were two people on that table using their laptops anyway. I had to go up to them and ask them to move,” Steve says.
Whether it’s turning the Wi-Fi off at certain times, or a sign that reads ‘no laptops at weekends please,’ it has bizarrely landed with café workers to reinforce our scantily laid boundaries between work and leisure.
Christos gets frustrated when customers demand the space to be something that it’s not. “Why isn’t the Wi-Fi working? Why aren’t there enough power outlets? It’s not your office space,” he says. “Seeing as it’s such a small business, I think it’s a bit disrespectful.”
While the economic cost of remote workers using cafes is hard to track, the social cost is perhaps clearer.
“The mood in the café shifts when most of the customers are on their laptops,” Christos points out. “I come from Greece, where coffee is strongly ingrained in our culture, so people will go out for a coffee, and they will spend hours chilling in a place, but socialising, not working,” he says. Christos would much rather serve a family spending time together than someone using the cafe while they’re on the clock.
Oscar agrees: “It’s like having empty seats. No conversation will come out of someone on their laptop.”
As evidenced by the recent controversy around London’s restaurant du jour, The Yellow Bittern, few people have the time or disposable income to spend on a lunch out. The restaurant’s head cook, Hugh Corcoran, took to Instagram to complain about how little people are willing to spend on lunch these days. “Restaurants are not public benches,” he wrote, reprimanding midday diners for sharing a few starters and then splitting the bill—imagine his disdain if someone brought a laptop in!
The comment left a bad taste in the mouths of Londoners, many of whom are struggling to eat at all, let alone well, given the rising cost of living.
In a New York Times article, Amelia Nierenberg distils Corcoran’s philosophy: “[Londoners] should have time to actually eat and talk — to have a meal, not a meal deal”. Corcoran tells Nierenberg, “We have to fight for lunch.”
Given the osmotic tug of work into leisure, should we then fight for the cafe too?
The truth is that cafes have always been a place for both work and leisure. The coffeehouses of 17th-century London provided a space for men to discuss business, law, and science, and are considered partly responsible for the spread of modern democracy. In post-war Paris, Simone de Beauvoir joined Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus under the green marquee of Paris’s Les Deux Magots for intellectual debates. At The Elephant House in Edinburgh, J.K. Rowling set her once expansive mind down to write The Philosopher’s Stone (granted, not on a laptop).
Recently, while accepting his Oscar for his work on The Brutalist, experimental composer Daniel Blumberg thanked Café OTO in Dalston, hosting coffee-sipping creatives on laptops daily and avant-garde music performances by night.
Perhaps cafes remain spaces for connection and conversation, but they all look different in the digital age. Who’s to say that while my friend and I stood in limbo at Lumberjack, we weren’t witnessing one of the laptoppers becoming the next Camus?
Featured image by Lauren Miller.