The real reason M&S is closing its cafes and we’re all saying goodbye to a very British institution

Tea, traybakes and a place to park your shopping while having a natter – the department store cafe was never cool, but it was ours. As M&S prepares to wind its own down, Hannah Twiggs looks at how they went from treat to sad retreat

The early days of M&S in 1914, when shopping was an event and a pot of tea afterwards was practically part of the purchase (Getty)

When Marks & Spencer announced that it would be closing 11 of its in-store cafes this week, it didn’t sound like much – until you realised it marks the quiet end of a national ritual.

For generations of shoppers, the M&S cafe was more than a place to refuel; it was a pause. A pot of tea between the hosiery and the homeware. A toasted teacake with your nan after a trip to the fitting rooms.

I grew up in the early Noughties, when no shopping trip was complete without a stop for lunch at BHS. My mum would take my brother and me to buy our school uniforms or, if I was lucky, something from Tammy Girl. Afterwards, we’d collapse into the cafe for sandwiches or carrot cake, flushed with the triumph of new pencil cases and pleated skirts.

My grandparents, who live in St Annes, did the same – retirees in neat coats, lingering over milky tea and cottage pie. Department store cafes were as much a part of British life as Sunday roasts and the Argos catalogue: dependable, unflashy and always slightly too hot.

They were, in their own way, the “husband seat” of retail – those upholstered perches in the fitting room where bored partners waited while you tried on clothes. A liminal space, somewhere between shopping and sitting still.

But over the past two decades, as department stores have emptied out and our high streets have hollowed, these cafes have faded with them. Now, where there were once Formica trays and filter coffee, there’s Pret, Leon and Starbucks – faster, slicker, more expensive and somehow less comforting.

However, the department store cafe actually began as something quite radical. When Marks & Spencer opened its first Cafe Bars in 1935, they served hot meals – chops, steak, fish and chips – to weary shoppers, offering many a taste of restaurant dining at working-class prices.

During the Second World War, when rationing took hold, those cafes became a lifeline: restaurant meals weren’t rationed, so you could still eat a proper plate of food without handing over a coupon. M&S cafes filled up with people seeking not luxury, but normality.

By the postwar years, they were models of modernity. Self-service counters arrived as early as 1947, chilled cabinets soon after. The food was plain but plentiful, the service brisk but polite.

John Lewis in 1936: Long before online wishlists, Oxford Street’s Christmas windows – and a stop for tea inside – defined festive shopping (Getty)

John Lewis, meanwhile, took the genteel route. At its John Barnes store on Finchley Road – which joined the partnership in 1940 – the basement food hall was famous across London. Customers travelled miles for its meats, pastries and smoked fish, all laid out in abundance even when ration books ruled elsewhere. By 1952, it was one of the first stores in the capital to go self-service, beating Waitrose by three years. Its fishmonger, George Humphreys, would even visit Billingsgate at dawn to buy the day’s catch himself, a ritual that feels almost unimaginable in today’s age of supply chains and spreadsheets.

By the 1960s, food accounted for more than half of the store’s profits. When John Barnes finally closed in 1981, the site became a Waitrose supermarket – a sign of the times. The future of food in retail wasn’t eating in, but taking home. Later attempts to revive the idea – like John Lewis’s Oxford Street food hall in 2007, complete with Moët bar and sushi counter – felt like nostalgia in disguise.

If M&S gave us comfort food and John Lewis offered civility, Debenhams was where Britain went for lunch. At its peak in the 2000s, the chain ran more than 160 cafes serving 20 million customers a year, proof that the department store cafe still had pull, even in the age of Pret and Costa. Its target market was clear: ladies who lunch, retired regulars and families needing a welcome breather.

In 2008, Debenhams poured £5m into a revamp to bring its cafes into the modern age. The new Style Cafes had deli bars, baby-changing “VIP zones” and wraps served with hand-cooked crisps. Cupcakes came in Sicilian lemon mascarpone; every breakfast used free-range eggs; Douwe Egberts coffee promised a whiff of continental sophistication. Harrods, who?

83%

of UK’s department stores have closed since 2016

But for all its charms, Debenhams never quite escaped its own decorum. The food was better than it needed to be – lamb shank with mint gravy, aubergine and walnut bake – but the ambience remained stubbornly utilitarian: trays, laminate tables, a view of the escalators. Democratic, dependable and slightly dowdy.

After 243 years in business, Debenhams finally closed its remaining stores in May 2021. Few mourned the coffee, but many missed the pause it offered – a safe seat in the middle of a busy high street, where a slice of Victoria sponge could still be eaten with a fork, not from a paper bag.

The store cafe’s demise isn’t just about taste. It’s about how we shop, how we spend, how we socialise. Since 2016, the UK has lost 83 per cent of its department stores, while online retail now accounts for almost a third of all UK sales. The ritual of “going shopping” – browsing rails, trying things on, stopping for lunch – has been replaced by next-day delivery and a coffee gulped between meetings.

Economic pressure hasn’t helped. Real household disposable income fell by almost 1 per cent in the first quarter of this year, the steepest decline since the first quarter of 2023. Eating out, even modestly, feels like an indulgence. The middle market that once sustained these cafes has evaporated; now there’s the £12 sourdough sandwich or the £3 supermarket meal deal, but little in between.

Culturally, too, we’ve shifted. The department store cafe was a third space – not home, not work, not the pub – where you could linger without being hurried or judged. Today’s coffee chains are designed for throughput, not repose: plug sockets instead of tablecloths, paper cups instead of china. Once, lunch was the punctuation in a day of browsing; now the browsing happens online in a matter of minutes before we’ve even thought about lunch.

By the Eighties, even the windows of Debenhams were modernising, but upstairs, the cafes stayed reassuringly the same (Getty)

There is, perhaps, one survivor: Ikea. Its cafes, all blond wood and beige trays, still draw queues for their Swedish meatballs, the unofficial reward for surviving the marketplace maze. It’s the same logic that once made department store cafes so beloved: the food is part of the experience, not an afterthought. At Ikea, the meal comes after the work, a moment of triumph and relief. Debenhams knew that feeling too; so did M&S, when it served fish and chips to shoppers in the 1930s. We haven’t stopped wanting that ritual. We’ve just moved it somewhere else.

When M&S shutters those 11 cafes, it will repurpose the space for larger food halls and “coffee shops”. All fair-trade beans, minimalist counters, no toasted teacakes. It makes commercial sense, but it also feels like losing something softer, slower, more British.

Department store cafes were never cool by any stretch of the imagination, and rarely fashionable. The lasagne was lukewarm, the lighting unforgiving. They were everything you never wanted in a restaurant. But they offered something our high streets now lack: a place to sit, without being sold to, where life could idle for half an hour. They were democratic, too – pensioners, parents, teenagers and toddlers all under the same hum of strip lights.

Maybe that’s why their loss feels strangely personal. They belonged to an era when shopping was an outing, not an algorithm. When lunch meant plates and company, not packaging and logging on.

Perhaps we’ll never again queue for a reheated lasagne on a tray, but there’s a quiet sadness in knowing there’s nowhere left to park your shopping bags, order a pot of tea and watch the world go by.