End of a Soho era

It is the cafe where time stood still. At the New Piccadilly in Soho - and who, one wonders, can remember the Old Piccadilly? - the formica-topped tables are just as they were 50 years ago, the lights are the same, even the menu is more or less unchanged. You can still have roast chicken and two veg, or steak and chips with spaghetti washed down with a cup of tea and finished off with peach Melba. Only the prices have changed.

But time is standing still no more at Lorenzo Marioni's cafe in Denman Street. Now this piece of living history is threatened with closure by the inexorable pressure of redevelopment and rising rents.

The economics of running an old-fashioned cafe in the West End are catching up with Mr Marioni, 61. With an annual rent of £51,000, and tax and insurance on top, he says: "It's £70,000 before I open the door - and I'm selling cups of tea for 50p." He predicts the business will not last beyond the next rent review by landlord Windmill Developments, in 18 months' time.

When the neon sign declaring EATS goes dark for the last time, it will represent a dying gasp of old Soho - where gangsters and tarts mixed with rockers and foreign royal exiles (and ravioli and chips cost three shillings). Back then the Casino de Paris strip club was next door, and streetwalkers plied their trade outside: now Denman Street is dominated by Indian restaurants. Round the corner the march of corporate culture - Gap and McDonald's and the Trocadero - goes on.

Mr Marioni, whose father Pietro ran the business before him, came to Britain from Italy in 1949. He can remember the impression the cafe's bright colours made. "In the early Fifties this was magic," he said. "The yellows, the citrus, the gold, all inspired by the Festival of Britain."

In the Fifties the venue was the haunt of Hungarian exiles who had

fled the Soviets. "Young toughs, Budapest street rats," said Mr Marioni. "There were fights and stabbings, they never spent money. They taught me to make the meanest Molotov cocktail.

"One came up to my dad with a rolled-up handkerchief and said, 'Look, Mr Marioni!' It was another chap's finger he had chopped off."

Then came the rockers. All black leather and noisy motorcycles, they frightened other customers away, so the Marionis removed the jukebox. Off the rockers roared, returning with rocks that they used to break the windows. "The whole front was smashed," said Mr Marioni. "I hid behind the pillar."

Soon there may be no more stories to tell. "Since the last rent review I've been on a razor's edge," he said. "I'll probably sell to the Indian businessmen who own most of the street and it will be another curry house."