Milano Coffee Bar

A Memory of Wolverhampton.

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?