Remember the Cereal Killer Cafe in London's Brick Lane? The one that sells extortionately priced bowls of cereal (£3.20) to punters in one of the most economically divided areas in the country?
Well, the cafe, which faced a lot of antagonism when it opened and the owners refused to acknowledge that they were the poster boys (all short back and sides hair, big beards and sailor tattoos) of a dark side of gentrification, has been attacked in a protest.
#fuckparade saw, according to their Twitter feed, around 1000 people - some in balaclavas, others in pig masks (referencing what David Cameron now denies doing when at an Oxford initiation) – marching through east London's Brick Lane Shoreditch on Saturday night. They threw paint at the Cereal Killer Cafe and smashed the windows of an estate agents and didn't seem to notice Subway or Pret. Not that brands are the problem... but still, if you don't like gentrification, you're going to need to paint most of the town red!
While there are distinct problems with the speed at which rundown areas, made trendy by the low/no income art students who initially move in to save money on rent, get regenerated into sky-high towers full of empty apartments owned by foreign investors: the cafe isn't to blame.
The owners tweeted that what's happened to their business is a 'hate crime'. It's definitely not – hate crimes are far more serious than that – but as annoying as they might seem, providing something entirely unnecessary to the world, they're not the main proponents of rising rents in the area. In fact, part of the reason they're charging so much for a bowl of Frosties is because they need to cover the cost of sky-high rents.
Maybe, #fuckparade's biggest mistake wasn't just the fact they had people brandishing fire poi at their protest, but that they thought the Cereal Killer Cafe was anything more than a symptom of a wider problem.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.