'Milano' Coffee Bar
As a school girl I have delicious memories of the forbidden coffee bar in Darlington Street. I remember it was downstairs, or is that now muddled with a thousand other coffee bars? It was dimly lit and had an amazing machine that hissed and spluttered and made coffee, the taste of which I have no recollection beyond the fact that it was not Nescafe or Camp. No, the memories are of the romance and the excitement of imagining being just a little bit French, of mixing with the A level crowd of all the local grammar schools, the odd arty teacher and students from the college. There I learned to smoke Gauloise and Sobranie (Black Russian cigarettes from a shop whose name escapes me, though I think it begins with B), learning about Jazz and a hundred different ways of disguising myself to avoid prefects. The Milano was a huge and innocent influence on my adolescence. I hold it fondly in my memories and wonder if anyone has other memories and maybe facts about it between 1958-1961?
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RE: RE: 'Milano' Coffee Bar
Hi Ann, we probably met all those years ago at the Queens and Dorchester ballrooms where we bopped our socks off. Great days. I knew the Milano but did not frequent it as it was a bit pricey for me then as I was in lodgings straight out of the cottage homes. My mates and I used to go to the cafe next to Zissmans then in School St, then take the girls down to the outdoor market stalls to "talk". Apart from a crap upbringing in the homes for the first 15 years of my life I was fortunate to have drive and ambitions, and I fared very well later. My more richer mates went to the Milano, but I was quite happy at the.... wish I could think of the name of it. It was in 1960, the year I left school (Springfield Secondary Modern) that I went there, and I worked at Viking Cycles factory in Retreat St. If you used to go bopping then, we could dance all night couldn't we? The nation was fitter then because we worked harder and walked everywhere. Great days. I started living in 1960 when I left the homes, but didn't have much money for a couple of years because I was only on 15 pennies an hour then, and my lodgings took 50 shillings a week. Funny old world aye. X
Comment from Pete Wilkes on Thursday, 1st July 2010.