Latest news with #CoffeeHouse
The Sun
7 days ago
- Business
- The Sun
Beloved cafe is forced to close down due to rising costs leaving loyal customers ‘gutted'
ANOTHER independent cafe has been forced to close as a result of the crippling economic conditions. Bookmark in Spalding, Lincolnshire, will be serving customers for the last time at the end of this month. 1 The cafe, which also boasts its very own bookshop, broke the news to loyal visitors recently. Owner, Darren Sutton, said: "Unfortunately, due to the current economic conditions and challenges in the retail and hospitality sector together with increased labour costs, increased employers' national insurance, business rates, food and energy costs it has become increasingly difficult for stores in town centre locations to be economically viable. "So with great sadness and regret that we announce that Bookmark will be closing on Friday, July 25. 'We wish to place on record our thanks to our dedicated staff who have worked for us during our tenure of the business, our suppliers and the support shown by our customers over the years.' The website has been taken offline so remaining purchases can be made directly through the store. The company also issued a short statement on Facebook, which read: "Unfortunately, the Coffee House of Bookmark is no longer open from today. "The Bookshop will remain open until we close. Thank you to our customers for all your support!" Customers flocked to the comment section to offer their condolences and support. "Bookmark will be sorely missed by so many of us. A wonderful independent store with a great coffee shop. I did manage to come into the shop last week," one wrote. "Can't imagine it not being part of Spalding any longer," they added. A second echoed: "When I moved to Spalding over 20 years ago, I was so excited that there was an independent book shop in the town. "I have loved spending time here over the years. Absolutely gutted you are closing." A third wrote: "Oh no, gutted you're closing. I always pop in when I visit on the way to my mum's. So sorry to hear this. Hope you have fantastic adventures planned!" It's not just the small companies being forced to shut up shop. Costa Coffee has been closing branches across the country, which has been described as "a sign of the times". On June 29, the store on Whitstable High Street, Kent, closed its doors for the final time. When Costa Coffee first arrived on Whitsable High Street five years ago there was some initial disquiet. The area is fiercely proud of its reputation for independent stores and cafes. But it's the latest casualty in a string of nationwide closures by the coffee chain which were first announced last year. This included the Costa in Maidstone town centre which shut up shop in January 2024. The British Retail Consortium predicted that the Treasury's hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion. Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure. At the start of this year, the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down in 2025. It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year. Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: "The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025." Professor Bamfield warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector across the year. "By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer's household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020."
Spectator
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
What liberalism's critics get wrong
Perhaps we are living in the early sixteenth century. Think of the ideology of the West as a sort of religion. It needs a reformation, a purging, a back to basics movement. In a sense this is well underway: for many years now, countless thinkers have attacked the flaws and complacency of the dominant Western ideology. Yet a positive vision has not really been articulated. We need something resembling the Protestant reformation. It did not chuck out the dominant religious tradition, it came up with a new account of its inner logic. To many thinkers, liberalism is a flawed ideology that must be comprehensively ditched. More careful thinkers admit to ambivalence. Despite its capacity for error, this is our tradition: we cannot disown it, rise above it. The absolutists see liberalism as akin to communism or fascism: a system that is wrong at its core. But on closer inspection there is an element of posturing in most of these thinkers; they cannot quite deny their affinity with this tradition. Nick Timothy has just provided an example of this. His call on Coffee House for a new conservatism at first seems to be yet another advocacy of 'postliberalism'. He emphasises that a crude free-market triumphalism on the right has been accompanied by a brittle insistence on individual rights from the left: a double-whammy erosion of common values. 'Conservatives need to reject liberalism and rediscover true, philosophical conservatism'. So: liberalism bad. Or is it? He then calls for a reassertion of 'the essential liberalism that stands for pluralism and our democratic way of life'. The average postliberal does not make this latter move, for fear of seeming lukewarm. But Timothy seems unsure how to expand on the goodness of 'essential liberalism'. Instead he echoes some conventional postliberal story-telling: 'Right from the beginning, liberal thought was built on the false premise that there are not only universal values but also natural and universal rights.' As a consequence, 'liberals ignore the relational essence of humanity: our dependence on others and our reliance on the institutions and norms of community life.' The claim to be defending 'essential liberalism' is elbowed aside by this attack on liberal thought as wrong to the core. I know that 'liberalism' is a complicated term, but it seems to me that few if any thinkers are really trying to grapple with the complexity. As I see it, Timothy is on the right track: there is an 'essential liberalism' that must be distilled from the confusing excesses of liberalism in our day. It is our political tradition, of liberal democracy, or the liberal state. It is a historical reality, not a theoretical thing: we should not over-value the importance of Hobbes or Locke or any other theorist. Instead we should look at what actually happened: England rejected absolutism of throne and altar in favour of a new political narrative, in which liberty was gradually protected and expanded. And the original ideology behind this was not 'universal human rights' – the creed of eighteenth-century Frenchmen, but 'liberty of conscience' – the creed of seventeenth-century English liberal Protestants. We need to re-tell our national story of 'essential liberalism', and revive pride in the tradition of the liberal state. Only so can we hope to reform liberalism in the wider sense, the baggy flawed creed that we inhabit.
Spectator
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Of course France won't stop the small boats
The BBC have visited the French coast to see for themselves that Nigel Farage (and Coffee House) aren't making it up: there is indeed a migrant crisis on the beaches close to Calais and has been for years. Britain certainly won't receive much in the way of help from the pro-migrant Emmanuel Macron, despite what Keir Starmer may claim The Beeb paid their call last Friday and encountered around 80 people waist deep in water. These weren't locals having a dip to escape the June heatwave but migrants from Eritrea, Afghanistan and elsewhere. They were waiting for what the BBC described as a 'taxi-boat', one of the myriad vessels that cruise the coastline picking up passengers and transporting them across the Channel to England. 'The taxi boat system appears to give the smugglers a little more control over what has often been a chaotic and dangerous process,' explained the BBC. More control means more efficiency which results in larger numbers of 'passengers' being taxied to England. So far this year over 16,000 have made the voyage north (an increase of 42 per cent on the same period in 2024). Given that the weather is set to be fair for the foreseeable future, the numbers will only increase in the coming months. Even Downing Street admitted on Tuesday that the situation is 'deteriorating'. There is another certainty to the Channel migrant crisis and that is that the French will do little to stem the human tide. Why should they? It's in the interest of the government to offload migrants onto Britain. At the start of the year Bruno Retailleau, the Interior Minister, bullishly declared that he wanted to change the rules of engagement so that the French police could intercept migrant boats in shallow water; that has yet to happen. Retailleau gave a lengthy radio interview on Wednesday morning, talking for 25 minutes and immigration and insecurity. Not once did he mention small boats on the Channel. What he did talk about was tightening France's borders within the Schengen area: in other words reducing the number of illegal immigrants crossing into France from Italy, Spain, Germany and elsewhere. But not a word about Britain. Retailleau doesn't care about Britain, and why should he? Like all French conservatives he believes Britain's migrant crisis is to large extent a mess of their own making. In 2015 one of Retailleau's centre-right colleagues, Xavier Bertrand, said migrants regarded Britain as a utopia 'because there's work there, and above all, you can work there without identity papers.' England, declared Bertrand, 'needs to change its rules on working with illegals'. Retailleau is expected to run as the centre-right candidate in the 2027 presidential election and a recent opinion poll indicated he is likely to be a serious contender. He's in favour of a referendum on immigration and he's also a fierce critic of what he regards as the left-leaning judiciary. For the moment, however, there is little he can do to tackle the small boat crisis so why get involved? It could undermine his tough-talking image. Better to turn a blind eye and let the British suffer. Britain certainly won't receive much in the way of help from the pro-migrant Emmanuel Macron, despite what Keir Starmer may claim. The PM and the French president apparently discussed the migrant crisis at this week's G7 Summit in Canada and agreed to 'work closely' together to stem the small boats. As closely as Macron promised Rishi Sunak in 2023? On that occasion the PM wrote the president a cheque for £500 million in return for a promise to clamp down on small boat crossings. It was, proclaimed Macron a 'moment of reconnection' between the two countries. As Donald Trump remarked earlier this week, 'whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong.' The same goes for all the British PMs who have boasted they were going to crack the migrant crisis.
Hindustan Times
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: Soumitra Chatterjee and his World by Sanghamitra Chakraborty
A few weeks before the release of Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), directed by Satyajit Ray, Charlie Chaplin's Limelight was re-released in Calcutta (now Kolkata). A large hoarding in the city displayed the film's poster. The actor Soumitra Chatterjee, who was making his silver screen debut with Ray's film, would 'admire this larger-than-life poster as he passed the area' on his way to work, writes journalist Sanghamitra Chakraborty. 'One evening… unmindfully looking up to get a glimpse of the Limelight poster… he got the shock of his life.' Chaplin's face had been replaced by his own. 'It was a poster of Apur Sansar.' This remarkable debut launched Chatterjee into a career that would make him one of the most important actors of the 20th century. Chakraborty's deeply researched biography, Soumitra Chatterjee and his World, explores all these different aspects of his life and career. Through in-depth interviews with his family, friends and colleagues, archival research (including Chatterjee's personal journals) and an analysis of his work, Chakraborty creates a compelling portrait of a complicated human being. Instead of slipping into the morass of a hagiography, which is common with celebrity biographies in India, Chakraborty explores even the less-than-complimentary aspects of her subject's life, such as his extramarital affairs and some dubious career decisions. However, she does this with a sort of empathy that does not in any way diminish Chatterjee, instead revealing him to be only too human. Though Chatterjee has been the subject of several biographies already, it is perhaps safe to say that this book is by far the most detailed and engaging one yet. Future biographers or anyone commenting on Bengali cinema, will have to take it into serious account. Soumitra Chatterjee and his World is divided into 10 parts, each exploring different aspects of its subject's life, such as his family and early years outside Calcutta, his college and university education, his early days in theatre (under the tutelage of the notable thespian Sisir Kumar Bhaduri), his Coffee House friends and literary pursuits, his committed leftist politics and his relationship with this wife Deepa, a talented badminton player. A significant portion is, obviously, dedicated to his relationship with Ray. The author writes several accounts of how Chatterjee prepared for the different roles he played in Ray's films, such as a hot-headed taxi driver (Abhijan, 1962), an aspiring 19th-century writer (Charulata, 1964), a beleaguered village priest (Ashani Sanket, 1973) or a sharp private investigator (Sonar Kella, 1974 and Joy Baba Felunath, 1979). These chapters also bring out the differences between the two men. The book is full of anecdotes that might surprise even the most devoted cinephile. For instance, writing about why Chatterjee did not collaborate with Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most celebrated art house Bengali film directors in the 1960s, Chakraborty describes an incident when the actor and the director came to fisticuffs. Quoting from an interview of Chatterjee, Chakraborty describes a public meeting where Ghatak and Chatterjee were guests. Quite characteristically, Ghatak turned up inebriated and started abusing Ray. 'I did not get provoked since I did not hold a brief to defend Ray,' says Chatterjee. 'Maybe he got frustrated at my nonchalance and he threw a swear word at me.' Flying into a rage, Chatterjee held Ghatak by the collar and landed a blow on his face. From the vantage point of half a century, it is somewhat amusing to witness, through Chakraborty's narration, two revered figures of Bengali cinema engaging in such behaviour. Such incidents remain with the reader long after the book has been put away. Chakraborty also analyses Chatterjee's work with filmmakers like Tapan Sinha, Asit Sen, Ajoy Kar, Tarun Majumdar, Dinen Gupta and Saroj De, locating it within the specific context of Bengali cinema. The sharp writing provides context to the cinema of the 1930s-40s, which Chatterjee watched while growing up, as well as his contemporary films. She also relates Chatterjee's complex relationship to Bengali cinema's reigning heartthrob, Uttam Kumar. While Chatterjee was a self-proclaimed Uttam Kumar fan, there was also considerable rivalry between the two, especially during a period of labour unrest in the industry in the late 1960s, when they found themselves in opposing camps. Some of this owes a debt to film scholar Sharmistha Gooptu's history of the Bengali film industry, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (2011). Though Chakraborty quotes from Gooptu, the book under review would have benefitted from more engaged editing, which would have ensured more rigorous citations. The book could have also included Chatterjee's family tree, bringing out his exact relation with such illustrious figures as poet and film critic Sourindra Mohan Mukhopadhyay, singer Suchitra Mitra or the freedom activist Jatindranath Mukherjee, better known as Bagha Jatin. Perhaps, these will be addressed in the next edition. Much of the writing on Indian cinema, both scholarly and popular, has focused on Bollywood. Besides Gooptu's groundbreaking work, there is very little scholarship on Bengali popular cinema. Film scholars and historians writing on Bengali cinema have focused mostly on Ray or his art house contemporaries, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, or more recently, Rituparno Ghosh. Sayandeb Chowdhury's Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema and Maitreyee B Chowdhury's Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen: Bengali Cinema's First Couple are rare exceptions. Chakraborty's book, therefore, explores new ground. It will hopefully be an inspiration to more scholars and writers to examine the history of a remarkable film culture. Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.
Time of India
08-05-2025
- Time of India
Illegal stall razed in Coffee House bldg
Kolkata: KMC on Thursday demolished a stall illegally constructed on the ground floor of the Indian Coffee House building on College Street. KMC will conduct a drive against three more illegal stalls that were locked on officials said space for the stalls was carved out of the century-old building's thick, load-bearing walls, hollowed out in sections. The stalls also encroached on the pavement. A month ago, Coffee House regulars spotted the wall being demolished and alerted cops, who stopped the work. A complaint was filed with KMC, which issued a stop-work notice and filed a police complaint. The building on 15, Bankim Chatterjee Street has a Grade I heritage tag as the Indian Coffee House is located there. The Graded List mentions that "no external change will be permissible" in a Grade I structure. According to locals, after Chuckervertty, Chatterjee and Co Ltd, a shop on the ground floor facing College Street, vacated the premises, the new owner began scooping out the thick walls to create space for small stalls.A civic official said the new owners did not seek KMC's permission for the work. "Any work in a Grade I heritage building requires permission from the KMC heritage conservation committee. Not only was this not sought, but the stalls that were constructed were also illegal," the official said.
