Okay. Let’s put this on the table, then get it cleared away. London Velo will be seen as evidence of the G-word. To be fair, Deptford has supposedly been in the throes of ‘gentrification’ for so long that you wondered if the gents had just gone somewhere else.
LV is a bike café that does a few simple things very well: coffee (from Union Coffee Roasters), cooked breakfast things, bagels, cakes, bike-fixing (they have a mechanic on site, and he was beavering away the two times I visited). It has Meantime beer and will bring you a pizza from The Big Red Bus round the corner in the evenings. It caters for vegetarians and vegans, has a friendly dog and the staff are lovely. It’s hardly revolutionary in London in 2015, but it sticks out on Deptford High Street like a sore thumb.
I can’t feel too guilty about this. There’s clearly demand: it’s busy all the time, and the High Street is hardly blessed with great places to eat, unless your diet consists of little pens from bookmakers. Plus, in the dozen years I’ve lived in or near SE8, I never set foot in whatever preceded it on this site and I can’t remember what it was. So yeah, I like it a lot. Does that make me an oppressor? Maybe. But at least I’m an oppressor who’s just eaten a delicious bagel.