The Surprising Reasons Why Paris Loves Sidewalk Cafés and London Doesn’t

It’s not just that you might get rained on and have to eat soggy crumpets in London

Café de Flore, where Jean-Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir wrote, in Paris / Credit: Wikimedia Commons

London differs from Paris in a striking way guidebooks seldom mention: It has far fewer sidewalk cafés with character.

The city has hundreds of restaurants with outdoor seating, but many are recent arrivals or part of chains that are short on history and ambience. And Covid lockdowns have taken a heavy toll. You’re unlikely to find the literary descendants of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir working on their books at a Café de Flore on the banks of the Thames, or the next Ernest Hemingway chatting up other writers at a Les Deux Magots hard by Hampstead Heath.

There are obvious explanations for the lack of a sidewalk-café culture comparable to that of Paris. One is practical, the late critic V.S. Pritchett suggested in my favorite book about the city, London Perceived (Daunt, 2016): London traditionally has had too few spaces ideal for al fresco dining.

“Compared with continental cities, it is poorly provided with places for sitting outside for a chat whenever and wherever you please,” Pritchett wrote.