Hipsters are making cash cool again

Carrying notes is no longer out of fashion - PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images

It’s approaching 30 years since an idle walk through east London began to be punctuated by candlelit bars strewn with vinyl records, wicker-basket bicycles, and young men endowed with facial hair that would put the most ambitious 19th-century imperial administrator to shame.

These symbols may now be in the twilight of their cultural power, but a new arena has emerged. Hipsters possess cash.

It is becoming something of a status symbol among independent restaurants and bars to refuse card payments. These are not venerable London establishments populated by “old geezers” and only ironically frequented by young arty types. They are places which appear to be designed precisely for the hipster.

Take the hugely popular north London haunt, The Yellow Bittern, which peevishly resists dancing around the whims of its patrons. Food is served only at lunch, dietary requirements are firmly not catered for, and payment is only in cash.

One might assume its appeal survives despite this friction, offset by the deliciousness of the food. In truth, its popularity lies not in spite of the inconvenience but because of it.

Hugh Cocoran, the socialist chef who co-owns the cashless restaurant, The Yellow Bittern - Heathcliff O'Malley

The same could be said of pubs such as The Olde Apple Tree in Peckham, where a mildly chaotic dash to an inevitably broken cash machine somehow heightens the evening’s pleasure.

How did cash acquire this cachet? Even before Covid it was fading. The pandemic merely administered the final blow. Card-only signs proliferated, and handling notes felt faintly unhygienic, even illicit.

Carrying cash became an anachronism. The last time I attempted to pay my hairdresser with actual money, I was met with a blandly uncomprehending look, followed by prim disapproval when they realised that the bundle of notes I was waving in my hand was intended for them.

Embarrassed, I reverted to contactless payment and apologetically left, hoping they did not think I was flaunting the remnants of a successful drug deal.

We inhabit an age of expensive necessities and cheap luxuries. Rent and electricity prices soar, while pleasures once reserved for the most entitled absolute monarch are available at the swipe of a screen.

On the (modest) income of a writer and tutor, I can, in principle, book a budget flight on a whim, stream operas, or order sashimi to my door.

In my university days, I remember a friend who was poised to embark on a career as a restaurant critic, remark gloomily that the job was defunct. New openings were simply too good for there to be any need for a critic as an arbiter of taste. He took a job at BlackRock.

If everything is easy, a little challenge starts to feel attractive. We’re seeing an inversion, where venues offering discomfort gain a status symbol.

One must plan ahead, locate a cashpoint and withdraw the correct sum. Yet the unprepared risk mild embarrassment. That preparation becomes a signal of belonging.

I, the alternative and indie, with my bundle of dosh and knowledge of obscure eating spots, can lord it over you, the Apple-paying Starbucks goer. I know the correct means of frequenting the hipster bar that you, as you clumsily try to tap your phone, sorely lack.

More restaurants and pubs are rejecting card payments to become cash-only - Photodisc

There is also an undercurrent of petty rebellion in all this. Digital payments are timestamped, categorised and absorbed into vast streams of data.

Impersonal algorithms are fed by our transactions, which in turn determine what we are shown and sold. The fact that I am sometimes to be found in a Peckham bar on a Friday night is unlikely to be of much interest to a Silicon Valley tech firm. But there is something faintly pleasing in the notion that the round of drinks I buy might pass from hand to hand without a trace.

This newly fashionable embrace of notes and coins is not without its ironies. As society drifts further towards the cashless, those who still depend upon it – the elderly, the unbanked, the homeless – find themselves increasingly excluded.

What is a trendy aesthetic in one context can look very different in another; some people still use cash not to display status but out of material necessity.

And yet its importance as a cultural signal is increasingly unmistakable. In a world where everything can be tapped, tracked and optimised, selective refusal has become a form of sophistication.

The metropolitan gesture may no longer be to flash your phone with practised ease but to pat your pockets with faint anxiety and produce a crumpled bundle of notes.

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