UCL student declares cafe society dead

Ben Wood (UCL History) has spent his summer researching the demise of French cafe society in Paris and Aix en Provence as part of his degree. Ben was awarded a £1,500 grant from the Peter Kirk Memorial Fund to carry out the research, which encourages young Britons to travel to Europe and write about a subject of their choice. The fund was set up in memory of Sir Peter Kirk MP, the pro-European Conservative who led Britain?s first delegation to the European Parliament. Ben was compelled to study this area because of the country?s revolutionary past and the cultural and political boom of the 19th and early 20th centuries when the politics of Lenin, the art of the Impressionists, the philosophy of Sartre and the literature of Hemingway all centred on the French cafes. Ben?s investigation had two strands: whether intellectual cafe culture still exists and whether the café as a French institution can still exist in the modern era. While he was in Paris Ben met up with John Lichfield, journalist for who helped him research the project and covered Ben?s story in an article published on Monday 30 November. Ben said: ?What surprised me the most was that intellectual avant-garde culture, in the vein of that of the ?20s and ?30s seemingly does not exist.