INTERVIEW
AT LUNCH WITH…
The Ace Cafe owner explains the importance of a disastrous flood and why the ton-up boys are still going strong…
On Saturday night, March 6, 1999, Mark Wilsmore and a dozen or so other motorcyclists were in the Ace Cafe, north London, drinking coffee and talking bikes. Back then the cafe was tiny, occupying a fraction of the space it does now, or had done when it first opened in 1938. But new owner Mark had expansion plans which – unbeknown to him – were about to take an explosive step forward.
“There was this incredible roaring noise,” he says, sitting eating his favourite poached egg on toast (no butter) in the revamped Ace Cafe. “It was like your head was in a jet engine – and, in the blink of an eye, the car park lifted up like a massive piece of carpet. Two thirds of the tarmac was up in the air, and the whole building was shaking. It felt like an earthquake”.
It turned out that, unknown to Mark and his mates, a monstrous five-foot-diameter water main that supplied most of north London ran below the cafe’s car park, and it had just fractured, the high pressure water inflating the car park like bubble-gum. “A column of water that must have reached 100ft shot up out of the car park over there,” says Mark pointing outside. “There were ominous crunching sounds. We thought that the building could collapse at any time, so we ran for our lives towards the back, where there was a fire escape.”
The volume of water being expelled is hard to comprehend, but one measure is that the nearby stretch of six-lane North Circular was underwater for 10 days. “Waist-high waves were created by the water landing. Tarmac, rubble and rocks were flying in all directions. When we’d escaped to a safe distance, I realised there was one person missing. I waded in to look for him and could see water coming in through a letterbox – it was that deep. The crunching noises were still going on, together with the sound of breaking glass. Then I saw him – he was on the [landline] phone! I shouted at him to get out and he said: ‘I’m just telling the missus I’ll be late.’ You can’t print what I said to him...” Thankfully everyone got out unharmed, and the disaster proved to be a turning point for Mark and the Ace Cafe. He’d taken out a mortgage a few years earlier and bought the whole site (most of it was being used as a tyre depot at the time) and had plans to return the Ace to its former glory, when it was the epicentre of biking culture in the south of England.
“That night changed the dynamics of everything,” he says. “When we came back the next day, it was obvious the place was wrecked and I knew we were going to have a fight with Thames Water because they’d try and blame everyone except themselves.” And so
