The plain white cups and saucers at the Indian Coffee House are smudged with stains of coffee and the grease of history. They are chipped at the rim and bear the cracks and lines of the political and cultural landscape of independent India. And if those walls could speak we would have a veritable treasure of stories and anecdotes. Photographer Stuart Freedman has a treasure too, as a journalist in the 90s his work brought him to India, and Freedman sought refuge in these coffee houses away from the cacophony and for the cheese toast. His documentation however began only in 2010 when the Indian media were full of stories about the Delhi Coffee House closing because of a mountain of unpaid debts. He followed them one by one to the most significant and beautiful coffee houses in the chain and spent the next 2-3 years photographing thirty of them. These images have now come together in a book titled "Palaces Of Memory". Source: Stuart Freedman

"However in a sense, all Indian Coffee Houses are addas (to use the Bengali) simple places of debate and discussion: they are a sort of cross in my mind between the Left Bank Cafes of Paris and the cheap, greasy spoon cafes of the London of my youth - themselves drenched in Post-War austerity and heirs to the Beat and Rock and Roll youth culture of the 1950s that were already fading by the time I discovered them. All of these places were inevitably full of memories... "

Source: Stuart Freedman

"I became a journalist in 1991 and have spent almost my entire working life abroad - mostly in Africa and Asia. By the time I got to India I had already covered the Siege of Kabul in 1994, stories in Pakistan, the war in Croatia, Haiti and conflicts in Eastern Europe, India (and Delhi in particular) was really difficult - I just couldn’t find a way to even begin to understand the place."

Source: Stuart Freedman