Café Delight is 21

7:00 am - 3:00 pm
Thursday, September 14, 2017 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Café Delight, 19 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7TS 2 minutes from Clapham North tube

Exhibition by award-winning photographer Jim Grover
14 September – Tuesday 31 October

Clapham High Street institution, Café Delight and its regulars, are the subject of social documentary photographer Jim Grover’s latest photo-essay.

The exhibition explores observations of daily café life and portraits featuring owners Izzy and Mehtap’s regulars. A total of 40 photographs document these two themes and will be exhibited in the cafe itself, to celebrate its 21st anniversary, until 31 October.

The family-run ‘caff’ opened its doors in 1996 and has been offering a warm welcome, friendly banter, countless mugs of milky tea, English breakfasts and hearty roast dinners ever since. It’s a beacon of continuity on a local high-street in a permanent state of flux – a world of challenged traders, ubiquitous coffee shops and high street chain stores.

For this exhibition, Grover has captured, a wonderfully broad spectrum of Café Delight’s patrons: a stand-up comic and a chain-saw wood sculptor rub shoulders with local builders, shop workers, and members of a local club for the deaf – – amongst many others. Some come for company, others come to eat and to pass the time alone, reading the paper, picking horses, or watching the world go by through the café’s large glass windows. Some of Café Delight’s regulars have been coming since it first opened 21 years ago, others are more recent converts.

Jim Grover adds: ‘This is not simply a café, with all of the traditional features you’d expect: great food, never-ending mugs of tea, friendly service and spotlessly clean tables. It’s also a community – – offering company, familiarity and security for those regulars who have made Café Delight part of their daily ritual. That made it a fascinating subject to capture and an obvious next project for me.”

This latest exhibition follows on from Grover’s photo-essay ‘Of Things Not Seen’ in 2016 and is hot on the heels of ’48 Hours on Clapham High Street’ exhibited in April this year.