Ace Cafe

The leather jackets indicated a reversion, in many of their tribal conventions, the stoical mask (goggles, cultivated toughness) and the metallic severity (the motor bikes, the fierce array of buckles and studs) of the 1945 generation. Even the transfers on their shoulders were ten-year old images adopted for their very brashness and crudity from what remained of the lost war pop culture in the highway cafes and gas stations.
The American pattern, the original of this particular mode, was old and more brutal than its English counterpart. In England the pivotal still was not brutality or dancing but simply fast and dangerous riding. In the early sixties every London hospital was crowded to overflowing with motorcycle casualties. The main rendezvous were the Ace and the Busy Bee, two sprawling seedy petrol stations cafés near the London terminus of the Mi. In the tables mess of the road systems, the jungle of glittering signs, the endless hypnotic cat's eyes, the monotonous lanes of traffic, the desolate motorway cafeterias, the rockers were strange and heartening breath of wildness and preserved integrity. They would come roaring down to London at the weekend in tribes, studs glittering, tangled greasy hair flying out behind them. There was something satisfying about the way in which a traffic stream on a hot Saturday, stalled, crammed with sweaty pink families trapped with one another as the Mini Minor was trapped in the queue, could be utterly negated, cancelled, by a column of gleaming rockers hurtling past hem to the round about.

Jeff Nuttal, Bomb Culture 1967