“We were campaigning outside 1 Commercial Street for 10 months last year, which is quite funny when people are now saying we should concentrate on property developers,” Bone said. “There’s was lots of stuff going on there – arrests, burning effigies – and not a peep in the press. Then someone throws a couple of bags of paint at a cereal cafe and it’s in the newspapers from Italy to New Zealand.”
Bone explained the idea behind the protests. He said: “The fight against gentrification has basically been lost and it’s speeding up all the time. So our philosophy is to go back to areas which have already been gentrified and start taking the fight back to them. In a way, going to Shoreditch was going behind enemy lines, the idea being that we take control of the streets for five or six hours, which we did.”
There had been no prior plan to target the Cereal Killer Cafe, he said: “No, it’s just what happened. The way the Fuck Parade works, people are there and then they wander off. It’s 1,000 or so anarchists and other people – it’s very hard to tell them to do anything. We just happened to be going past it.
“Anyway, I must have been one amongst many people astounded to see a cafe flogging cereal open at nine o’clock at night. If I’d have put money on us going for anything it would have been Foxtons, and it wasn’t.”
