History
It opened in 1938 to accommodate traffic on the new North Circular Road. Because the cafe was open 24 hours a day, it started to attract motorcyclists. It became popular with the Ton Up Boys (and girls) in the 1950s and the Rockers in the 1960s and was where the motorcycling priest Bill Shergold came to invite them to the 59 Club.
The cafe was rebuilt in 1949 after being destroyed in a World War II air raid. The building is close to the Willesden railway marshalling yard, target of the raid.
Events in the post-war environment made the Ace a success: the emergence of the teenager; increase in traffic; and the British motorcycle industry at its peak. Many young people started to meet at the cafe with their motorcycles and listen to rock'n'roll. Many bands and motorcycle enthusiast groups formed there.
The cafe closed in 1969 and the building became a tyre sales and fitting shop.
Read more about this topic: Ace Cafe London
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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