A spectre is haunting east London. It floats through the curry houses of Brick Lane, passes by the minimalist coffee shops and the vintage boutiques, spooks the husk of Boxpark and makes cheese plants float in tech startups. A single silver spoon still hangs in its mouth, caked in dried milk and coagulated Lucky Charms. Beware the Ghost of the Cereal Killer Café.
This phantasm might be just a figment of my imagination. But the spirit of the Cereal Killer Café remains, a symbol of sugar-coated gentrification.
It was exactly 10 years ago, in December 2014, that the café opened on east London’s most iconic street. The brainchild of identical twins Gary and Alan Keery, it sold bowls of more than 100 types of cereal from across the world for £2.50 a pop, with all sorts of toppings on offer (for extra cash, of course) and “cereal cocktails” swimming with even more syrupy sludge.
There was a sense of hyperactive excitement from the outset. “When I started, we had lines down the road—people loved the nostalgia of the décor, the old cartoons on the TVs, and the cereals from all over the world. It was a happy place, attracting daily visits from A-list movie stars and celebrities—even Boris Johnson, who once rode his bike in for a bowl,” says Matthew Moncrieff, who became a manager at the café. It dished out over 20,000 bowls of cereal within its first month of trading and opened up a second franchise in—surprise, surprise—Camden, just a few months later.
I remember heading to the Cereal Killer Café as a 17-year-old, spending far too much of my pocket money on some sort of Coco Pops concoction as Cartoon Network blared in the background. As much as I might cringe now, I loved it at the time. Tom Whyman, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Liverpool who wrote about the Cereal Killer Café for Vice in 2015, wasn’t bowled over. “In reality, probably the reason that it didn’t work was because it was rubbish. It was not a particularly pleasant place to sit, and all the ‘rare’ cereals they had were just, like, ultra-processed stuff designed for the palates of American pre-teens,” he says.
He wasn’t alone; a furore matched the fanfare. For starters, who would be loopy enough to spend money on cereal—something they probably had at home—while out and about? “It was something about the basic childishness, as it were, of the idea. A café that only sells cereal—I mean, it’s the sort of idea you’d come up with, and believe should exist, as a child,” Whyman says.
Cereal, after all, represents an unpalatable immaturity that lingers like toothache. “In Seinfeld, Jerry mostly only eats cereal—this is a symbol of his stunted emotional development. As an adult, naturally, you think: well, no one has done it. There has to be a reason such a place wouldn’t work,” Whyman continues. The Cereal Killer Café was provocative because it did work. “It existed in defiance of that particular assertion of the reality principle. I think that might be part of why people were so upset. They wanted to shut down the Cereal Killer Café in their own head.”
The real killer, though, was gentrification. The Keerys’ business came at a time when protests against property developers were rife. “The moment was marked by several significant grassroots housing campaigns in the area, including campaigns to save both the Holland Estate and the New Era Estate from development, both within a 15-minute walk of the café. This is the context within which I remember the brothers arriving to sell bowls of cereal,” says Alex Rhys-Taylor, an urban sociologist and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Of course, this wasn’t a new phenomenon; Brick Lane had long been rebuilt, piece by piece, into a hotspot for rich hipsters. “The Cereal Killer Café’s arrival was far from the beginning of Brick Lane’s social, economic and demographic transformation. Nor was it a driver of subsequent changes. Let it not be forgotten that the retail unit in which the Cereal Killer Café opened had previously been an arthouse and independent cinema DVD rental outlet. The transformation of Brick Lane really started decades before,” Rhys-Taylor says.
Shoreditch was, for years, a working-class area in decline, plagued by crime and poverty. But by the late 1980s, dirt-cheap rent made it the new place to be for artists and creatives, with abandoned factories turned into chic studios. Students looking for cheap digs moved in, the Young British Artists (YBAs) brought the aesthetes, and free party pioneers held illegal raves in disused warehouses. But it soon lost its edge. In 2005, the sitcom Nathan Barley warned of the “rise of the idiots”—the buffoonish charlatans, imbecilic chancers and tasteless scenesters taking over Brick Lane on kids’ BMX bikes. By the early 2010s, Shoreditch was already a self-parody, a cartoonish caricature of counterculture.
The Cereal Killer Café was the final, milkshake-loaded straw. “Perhaps the Cereal Killer Café was the last gasp of Nathan Barley-ism,” Whyman says. “At the time, it felt like London had an endless supply of quixotic bluffers and rich kids able to briefly achieve notoriety for doing something quirky (and then it would get written about in Vice). In a certain way, this was what ‘London’ meant, back then: it was where people went, seemingly, to behave like that. And of course this was always associated with gentrification.”
And if, as Whyman has written, gentrification is often glossed over with cuteness—he coined the phrase cupcake fascism—the Cereal Killer Café did this in spoons. “Something about the product it was offering, its location, the way it was promoted, meant that it became associated with gentrification in a much more direct way. I suppose there was a sense, perhaps, of the quirkiness as pure front, that really this was the naked truth of what this Nathan Barley-ism had always been about, all along,” he says.
Gary and Alan Keery—armed with a charming demeanour, craft-beer beards and matching Beyond Retro shirts—tried to defend their business from an onslaught of criticism. But it soon turned sour. An interview with Channel 4 in the café’s opening week saw Alan interrogated about whether local people in Tower Hamlets would be able to afford the cereal. He cracked under the pressure. “If they’re poor, probably not then. Can we stop this interview because I don’t like the questions you’re asking me?” Soon they were, according to the Evening Standard, “the most hated men in London”—with diatribes on Twitter calling them out for their lack of self-awareness.
Moncrieff thinks they were unfairly made the fall guys. “The café was started by two brothers who were self-funded. The criticism seemed unjustified and mostly came from people who hadn’t visited or researched the café. Interestingly, a Pret A Manger opened a few doors down, but the focus remained on us, a small local business. Pret got off scot-free. Pret is owned by a billionaire German family—make that make sense!”
Even at the time, some columnists argued that the Cereal Killer Café was a symptom, rather than a cause, of gentrification. “I mean I think the Keerys had a point: they were being scapegoated. Their notoriety made their business the most obvious target. But they were never the ones actually driving gentrification: they’re a couple of guys running a café that only sells cereal, they’re not property investors, they’re not multiple decades of neoliberal economic policies,” suggests Whyman.
But a year later, milk was spilt. On 26th September 2015, the café was attacked by an anti-gentrification group called Fuck Parade, led by anarchist Ian Bone. “They were terrifying. I was working late with one staff member when a massive group with pitchforks and pigs’ heads on sticks attacked, throwing paint at the windows and doors. Everyone inside was terrified, especially the children. We saw red paint, fire, and a mob trying to burn the place down,” Moncrieff remembers. “The anger was so misplaced. Why were they attacking a place of joy and fun?”
After the shop was patched up, the Cereal Killer Café continued to grow, branching out to Birmingham before opening up franchises in the Middle East: Jordan, Kuwait, Dubai and Qatar (planned outlets in Oman and Bahrain never materialised). In 2018, the company launched its own cheekily named cereal range, including Unicorn Poop and Salty Balls. But in 2019 a new indie musical, The Cereal Café, poked further fun at the venture. Then, in July 2020, as Covid began to take hold, the Keery brothers announced they would close the Cereal Killer Café for good in the UK. Fittingly, it now solely survives in Dubai, the playground of the rich.
For those who worked there, the Cereal Killer Café was a success. “I always admired their dedication to their idea and making their dream a reality. It’s a shame the media had a field day and, in some part, succeeded in tarnishing what could have been a success story. It was a true David versus Goliath situation,” Moncrieff says.
In its wake, though, the Cereal Killer Café left a trail of other childish businesses. It was at the helm of the area’s infantilisation, tapping into the emerging “kidult” trend of nostalgic novelty venues. “It was truly the first of the kidult businesses. Today, you see many different concepts like cat cafés, axe throwing and escape rooms, but none faced the pushback we did,” Moncrieff says.
Years after the Cereal Killer Café closed, these businesses live on, refusing to grow up: nearby the gauche ping-pong bar Bound and ballpit cesspit Ballie Ballerson are still going. And grown adults still choose to hurtle down a Brewdog slide. We might not eat cereal out anymore, but we still do all sorts of naff, kitsch things.
And whether you think it was juvenile or joyful to spend a fiver on a new cavity, it’s true that the Cereal Killer Café was incredibly unlucky, the perfect foil for concerns surrounding the demolition of our cities. “The problem with trying to do something like ‘fight gentrification’ is: gentrification is not one, discrete thing. It is a big, nebulous phenomenon with a bunch of diffuse causes,” Whyman says.
The café became a flashpoint. “We like to concretise diffuse phenomena in specific individuals. Which I suppose is what happened with the Cereal Killer Café.” But, years after it closed for good, gentrification hasn’t become any gentler. While the iconic Brick Lane Beigel Shop may have come back from the dead, dozens of original businesses have been lost recently. Just last week, a new application from Truman Brewery has reignited anger surrounding the gradual building-over of Banglatown, the Bangladeshi community that’s long been part of Brick Lane.
So the Ghost of the Cereal Killer Café haunts east London, an epitome of hipsterism and the business that buried Shoreditch. But it’s less Jack the Ripper, more an inert spirit that, at its worst, ripped us all off with overpriced bowls of Apple Jacks. And in the shadows lurks something far more sinister, far more concrete: property developers.
