Culture

Shoreditch’s Cereal-Only Cafe Responds To Anti-Gentrification Riot After Storefront Attack: “The Mob Won’t Win”

:(

by Steph Harmon  28 September 2015

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

It’s a dark day for cereal lovers. A sad and angry day. An off-milk kind of day. A stale All-Bran day.

On Saturday night, around 200 protesters wreaked havoc through East London carrying torches, paint and missiles, in a violent and misdirected anti-gentrification riot that coalesced under the #fuckparade hashtag.

Their target was Brick Lane’s seemingly innocuous Cereal Killer Cafe: the UK’s first ever cereal-only eatery, which attracted ire when it was opened last December by a pair of identical bearded brothers, Alan and Gary Keery, who were selling over a hundred varieties of cereal (with handpicked toppings) for around £3.20 — or AUD$7 a bowl.

Via Cereal Killer Cafe.

Interviewed by the Guardian, Gary described a chaotic scene on Saturday night, in which their customers — some of whom were children — began barricading the doors before being sent downstairs to safety. Bottles, smoke bombs and furniture were thrown, as the group smashed windows, sprayed graffiti, and burned an effigy of a police officer outside.

“We’ve had some letters through the letterbox saying ‘die hipsters’ and stuff but nothing to this extreme,” Gary said. Helicopters and a riot squad were called to the scene, and one policeman was injured after a bottle was thrown at his face.

Blogger Jasimine Yip found herself in the middle of what she described as “mindless thuggary“: “At first I dismissed it as an obnoxious pub-crawl. But as the group grew ever larger and their tone became ever clearer, it was obvious that they were rabble-rousers trying to intimidate  — their swagger inebriated by booze and the sort of misplaced socialism so often appropriated by the bored who try to assuage their middle-class guilt with demonstrations designed to stroke their own vanity.”

According to the #FuckParade’s (weirdly racist) manifesto: “Our communities are being ripped apart – by Russian oligarchs, Saudi Sheiks, Israeli scumbag property developers, Texan oil-money twats and our own home-grown Eton toffs … We don’t want luxury flats that no one can afford, we want genuinely affordable housing. We don’t want pop-up gin bars or brioche buns – we want community.”

Gentrification is as much a problem in East London as it is in Redfern and Fitzroy, and real solutions are necessary to protect local communities and cultures from rent-raising and profiteering. But this particular protest, the third of its type organised by anarchic group Class War, targeted a symbol of the problem rather than its cause. As resident Audrey Gillan wrote in a Guardian opinion piece, “Yes, the East End is changing, and much of the development has no care for community, housing, affordability or social cohesion. But scapegoating hipsters riding fixie bikes, and more specifically, a couple of beardy brothers selling cornflakes, is hardly brave or intelligent.”

Alan and Garry Keery — who have matching cereal tattoos, another cafe in Camden, and a cookbook out next month — are staying up-beat. They re-opened their business the next morning, after a bit of a makeover, and proclaimed “the mob won’t win”.

–

Watch footage of the riot at The Guardian. Feature image via Cravendale.