Three simple expressions but they represent perhaps the most powerful fusion,
not only in yesterday’s rock n’ roll era, but also in today’s.

The Ace Cafe was built in 1938 as a roadside cafe to cater for traffic using the new North Circular Road. In World War Two, the building was badly damaged and subsequently rebuilt in 1949. It was a state-of-the-art cafe and one of the first to use neon signage. With it’s proximity to Britains new and fast arterial road network, and staying open 24 hours, the Ace Cafe soon attracted hoards of young motorcyclists who were bored and searching for their own identity.
They found it at the Ace, together with the ‘devils’ music – rock n’ roll.

With the advent of the ‘teenager’ in the early fifties, the Ace boomed with the arrival of the Ton-Up Boys. The British motorcycle industry was at its peak, when along came rock n’ roll. It wasn’t played on radio stations, so the only places it could be heard was at fairgrounds or on Jukeboxes at transport cafes.

“Drop the coin right into the slot”……

From this powerful fusion of motorbikes and rock n’ roll, came the legends of record racing. Dropping a coin into the slot, then racing to a given point and back before the record finished, turning the North Circular Road an unofficial race track.

Come the sixties, the Rocker had emerged, and the Ace Cafe became the launching pad for many of our British rock n’ roll bands, like Johnny Kidd & The Pirates. Gene Vincent also visited the cafe on one of his tours, and the Beatles are reputed to have been there before they became famous.

The rock n’ roll peak was over by the mid-sixties, made safe by The Beatles and pushed aside by Carnaby Street and the Mod era. The changes in the social order and growth of the car market, at the expense of the motorbike, saw the Ace Cafe serve it’s last egg and chips in 1969.

Following its demise, the building has been used as a filling station, bookmakers, vehicle distributors, and tyre depot, but remained largely unaltered. Driven by his passion for bikes, rock n’ roll and history, in 1993 Mark Wilsmore, with the permission of the owners of the site, set about planning an event to mark the 25th anniversary of the cafes closure, with a dream to reopen the place. That event, in September 1994 attracted 12,000 motorcyclists and rock n’ roll fans from far and wide.

A film, entitled ‘An Ace Day’ was made, featuring interviews with former patrons of the Ace and today’s riders, to a rock n’ roll soundtrack. There followed a seven year labour of love, which saw Mark obtain planning consent to turn the premises back into a cafe, and eventually purchase the site and building. Initially opening a part of the building at weekends and putting on events with the aid of a burger van for three years. In March 1999 potential disaster struck, a hatch on the main North London water supply exploded in spectacular fashion! Buried ten feet under the Ace car park, it wreaked havoc, with the resultant flooding submerging the adjacent section of the North Circular Road, which remained closed for almost a week. The huge blast had a severe effect on the structure of the building. Debris and bikes were blown skywards on a wall of high pressure water, shattering the windows and damaging the roof.
Despite this setback, Mark’s determination to save this legendary icon continued unabated.