Significance - Wellington cafe culture

The significance of café culture in the formation of Wellington's identity

by Jason Gaskill

Changes in the Wellington café scene

From the mid to late 1940s an affinity for coffee, and the places that dispensed it, spread through Wellington and continued into the 1960s. From the mid 1970s until the late 1980s the café scene all but disappeared. Yet today's Wellington has numerous cafés, and the rise of Jungle, Fuel, the presence of Starbucks and the proliferation of 'ethnic' cafés testify it is a thriving segment. Other researchers have investigated why this came to be. I want to turn attention to a different, more theoretical issue: has it mattered?

Is café culture integral to Wellington's identity?

It is often stated that the café scene is integral to Wellington's identity as a city. This prompts several questions. Can you identify 'Wellington' without referring to the social institution of the coffee house? How interconnected are the identity of Wellington over time and the holes-in-the-wall the population tend to frequent? More importantly, how are you able to track the union between these elements, or judge their importance? Other articles in this exhibition indicate there is a link between the cultural phenomenon of cafés and the social identity of Wellington. Often, the prevalence of immigrant proprietors and the cosmopolitan nature of Wellington underlie such claims. However, they need further investigation and independent support—neither of which will be found.

The significance of immigration

Other research into the history of Wellington café culture demonstrates some connection between the presence of Greeks and the emergence of milk bars (the precursor to the café scene) and Dutch immigrants and the rise of coffee houses. These findings imply that immigration and cafés have some link. Given that immigration is one element mentioned in the literature about Wellington's identity, it is interesting to track the progress of café construction and prominence within Wellington, in conjunction with the influx of immigrants. Such a broad-brush approach does offer some superficial evidence that the links between immigration, cafés and social identity may be overstated. The café gap of the 1970s and 1980s in fact coincides with an increase in immigrants.

This inquiry could be further refined to break down immigrant information by specific country, by year, and by physical address in Wellington compared with the location of the cafés. This would establish whether or not café presence matches fluctuations in the number of those immigrants who produced the café culture. However, the basic information provided here is interesting because it indicates that the assumption made by many needs clarification or corroboration.

Immigration trends compared with numbers of cafés

Comparisons across statistical information on the number of cafés by decade and the number of immigrants by decade suggest no consistent connection between immigration and café development. Consider the simple graph, Figure 1, indicating the historical progress of café construction in the greater Wellington region from 1950–2000 in relation to the following, Figure 2, which illustrates the number of immigrants to Wellington by decade.

These graphs tell us that immigration into Wellington consistently increased through the period of café decline, between the early 1970s and the mid 1980s, while the number of cafés dwindled from 93 in 1970 to only 61 in 1980 and only 75 in 1985. Although the culture may not have actually disappeared, it surely plateaued. Yet, one of the primary social identifiers of Wellington, namely immigration, continued to increase steadily, from 985 immigrants in total between 1955 and 1959, to 2800 in the decade of the eighties. The two trends appear to diverge, not converge.

Are cafés a significant cultural phenomenon?

If the cafés and identity are connected, one must argue that at least one cylinder in the engine driving identification and social development died when café numbers dwindled. Something could have taken their place, but then we must ask how integral was such a cultural phenomenon if it could be replaced with no resulting imbalance in social development. The fact that cafés were there, or that people of a particular ilk frequented them, means little if the city would have evolved in a similar fashion from the presence of a different type of establishment. What is important is the fact that there were a lot of immigrants. The cultural baggage they brought with them needs further investigation and some element of non-anecdotal evidence to transform it from bland assumption into historical fact.

Conclusion

The information above shows that is not necessarily the case that cafés are integral to the identity of Wellington if they reflect the make-up of the community, and those espousing the view must positively prove it. Entrepreneurial immigrants, leftist ideals and politicians floating in with the tide of Eastern Europeans, emotive movements against global domination—these have been demonstrated to be socially important. They may have produced cafés, leading to conjecture about the relationship between what people did and why. But such conjecture proves nothing. It merely provides a starting point for further investigation, and an indication of the information that needs to be sought in order to understand our fundamental question.