Imagine the scene. It’s a bright, sunny day, and instead of working from the grim bedroom of your basement flat-share, you decide to treat yourself and head out for the day. You arrive at your favourite local café; order an artisanal (read: expensive) coffee and pastry; get yourself settled in a window seat where you can people-watch in between tasks; and pull out your laptop. But wait – an invisible line of red tape has been crossed! You’ve unwittingly committed a cardinal sin at this particular establishment! The barista gives a passive-aggressive cough and nods towards the window, where a jaunty “No laptops please! Thanks for understanding (winky face)” sign sits in judgement.

This scenario is increasingly becoming a reality in independent cafés across the UK. A recent Guardian article referenced three separate London proprietors who explained the reasoning behind their enforced computer ban. One business owner cited the “energy” being off when his three branches were full of hunched, silent punters tapping away on laptops rather than a community of people chatting and laughing. But the main motivation seemed to be cold, hard cash. “People would buy a tea that cost £3 and would sit there all day… you just can’t afford to keep an establishment going like that,” he said. Another café owner decided to restrict laptop use to one hour a day and make it strictly verboten on weekends after feeling like his cosy coffee shop had turned into an unofficial coworking space.

In 2024, Newbury-based coffee shop Milk & Bean, The Collective in Caversham and Fringe and Ginge in Canterbury all made headlines after introducing laptop bans or restricted-use policies to up turnover and foster community.

And just last month, the Reading branch of franchise Black Sheep Coffee went viral after it announced a policy of “no laptop, no tablet, no study” from 12pm on Fridays until 7pm on Sundays in response to customer complaints about a lack of weekend table space. Reading is a lively university town; the new rules were essentially aimed at students who lacked deep pockets but wanted to meet and study in pleasant surroundings.

“Working in a café can be much more productive and give a change of environment for a short time, when you’ve been studying at home or at university for hours,” lamented one undergrad to Gloucestershire Live at the time. “We love to have a sweet treat and matcha to keep up our energy with the workload we have as final years.”

While I’m normally in favour of anything that encourages us all to down devices and live in the real world for however brief a spell, the imposition of this new regime has… irked me, to put it politely.

First off, there are the signs themselves. It’s a small point, but I’ve spotted various iterations around, both in person and on social media, and there always seems to be an unbearable quirkiness or self-congratulatory whimsy about the whole thing that rubs me the wrong way. “We would rather the tables were reserved for laughter, flirting and conversation”, reads one of those quoted in the Guardian, for example. “No wifi – pretend it’s 1985 and talk to each other!” seems to be perpetually adorning cutesy chalkboards across the nation. Admittedly, I wasn’t even quite a twinkle in someone’s eye in 1985, but I’m still highly suspicious of the notion that people went into cafés and expected to strike up a conversation with random strangers 40 years ago. Introversion, I’d wager, isn’t merely a 21st-century affliction created by the internet.

I’m not unreasonable, and I do understand the need for small independent businesses to make a profit. But, in the post-Covid world, we must acknowledge the reality that most cafés have in fact become de facto coworking spaces – whether they chose to do so or not.

For one thing, there are simply far more of us working from home these days. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), prior to the pandemic, only one in eight UK workers engaged in remote working. Now, more than a quarter (28 per cent) of us are hybrid working, while 16 per cent report that they work from home full-time. Crucially, this isn’t always by choice; some companies, seeing how much money they’d save and how smoothly their employees had adapted to working online during lockdowns, simply axed their offices altogether.

And, as the pandemic proved, working from home – for all its benefits – creates a two-tier system. The haves and the have-nots. As in, the people who have an airy, quiet home office space conducive to working in – and those who very much have not got anything even close to such a convivial arrangement. ONS data from 2023 reveals that houseshares (those containing two or more unrelated adults) account for 2.9 per cent of all households in the UK. While that may not sound like a big percentage, it accounts for, at the absolute bare minimum, 1.6 million people.

As anyone who has lived in a houseshare can testify, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have room in communal areas to create a decent workspace. Just after lockdowns lifted, I found myself cohabiting with a couple in a cute but “bijou” two-bed flat, forced to squeeze a desk into my damp, dark bedroom. The place I slept, relaxed and ate most of my meals in was now also my depressing “home office”. Occasionally decamping to a coffee shop for the morning was the one bright spot in my otherwise bleak schedule, helping to boost my mood and up my productivity.

It’s not just me who experiences this lift when I work from a café; academic studies have suggested that the background noise – the gentle lilt of conversation coupled with the clatter of coffee machines and cups – actually helps us focus. Research revealing that moderate levels of ambient noise foster creativity even led to the development of Coffitivity, a selection of “curated soundscapes from international coffee shops” to listen to while you work.

The axing of public services across the country has also left a void that cafés have inadvertently ended up filling. Since 2016, more than 180 council-run libraries have closed or been handed over to volunteer groups, with a third of those remaining forced to reduce their hours. Again, it’s those who don’t have the privilege of space or wealth who are impacted most when we lose access to vital free resources and spaces. Where else are they supposed to go?

In the end, it surely boils down to etiquette. I think we’re all aware that rocking up to a small business, buying one cheap drink and parking it for eight hours while occupying valuable space, rinsing their power sockets and taking loud business calls constitutes unacceptable behaviour. It goes against the unspoken yet fundamental rules that underpin the entire working-from-home community. I have huge sympathy, for example, for the aforementioned Fringe and Ginge – it outlawed laptops only when entitled work-from-home types started telling café staff to be quiet during their work calls.

“We had some really bad experiences with people, like asking us to turn music off so they could do Zoom meetings,” co-owner Alfie Edwards told The Telegraph. “We were asked to be quiet, we were making too much noise.” Which is, let’s face it, nothing short of obnoxious.

But, I’d argue that it’s this tiny minority of customers who are the real problem. Why should they ruin things for the rest of us well-behaved keyboard-wielders? To totally misquote Welsh rappers Goldie Lookin Chain: Laptops don’t ruin cafés, entitled a***holes do.