Coming Of Age At The Ace Cafe

3 June 2011 to 2 October 2011

This Summer, the Rockers return as Coventry Transport Museum and Ace Cafe London present a new exhibition telling the story of how a London transport cafe became an international icon, and how the cafe's customers redefined what it meant to be a teenager in the 1950s and 60s.  

Planned as a transport cafe for lorry drivers during the 1930s, the Ace Cafe on London's North Circular Road quickly became a place where motorbike riders gathered.  In the 1950s the Ace became the destination for a new breed of motorcycle riders; teenagers who met there to listen to rock 'n' roll, and to burn up the road doing The Ton - the magic speed.

They were daring and dangerous, and their lifestyle has influenced fashion, music and motorbikes ever since.

For Coming Of Age At The Ace Cafe, the cafe itself will be lovingly recreated inside the Museum, and then filled with bikes, clothes and stories from the 1950s and 60s,The exhibition is completed with a series of graffiti collages depicting “that Classic motorcycle feeling” made especially for the Ace Cafe by Spanish artist Antonio Merinero.