A good coffee, maybe a slice of cake, take a moment to admire the dazzlingly complex aerodynamic forms of the Aston Martin Valkyrie that’s parked next to the counter… I’ve only been to Podium Place in Newbury once and I don’t know if there’s always an exceedingly rare, multi-million pound hypercar wedged between the front door and the sofas, but that one visit certainly left an impression.
On Newbury’s Bone Lane in this dreary industrial estate, with a sheet metal works to one side and a water treatment plant on the other, Podium Place looks out of, well, place. It’s one of a new breed of cafés and pubs themed around cars. They seem to be popping up everywhere – The Motorist near Leeds, The Piston Club close to Stratford-upon-Avon, nearby Gilks Garage Café, and perhaps the progenitor of them all, Caffeine & Machine, now with three venues dotted around the country. It’s enough to make you think car enthusiasm has gone all mainstream.
We can ask why, but we should also ask why now? The prevailing winds hardly seem to blow in favour of car pubs and cafés, not when you consider that fewer young people are bothering to learn to drive, that modern cars are becoming inherently less interesting to the typical enthusiast, that ride hailing in big towns and cities means many people simply don’t need cars of their own nowadays, that rising purchase and insurance costs are making car ownership ever more expensive, and that our roads are teeming with fixed cameras, mobile cameras, cameras on phones, cameras attached to windscreens, cameras watching on like spies seemingly everywhere we go…
