Find those cafes!
Today, a Friday in April 2006, there are 449 Starbucks stores in England, 8 in Northern Ireland, 3 in Scotland and 4 in Wales; less than ten years ago, there weren't any Starbucks in the UK at all.
We think that independent cafés foster local communities and circulate money in the local economy. The aim of this website is to promote the UK's many independent cafés, in the hope that the UK will keep its diverse cafe culture rather than becoming yet another endless, dull franchise.
Franchise?
The Delocator started as an American website: delocator.net. The mission of delocator.net is to "assist the public in finding and supporting independently owned cafés" and it succeeded, with over 5000 independent cafes across America being entered by the public.
Following the success of delocator.net, delocator.ca was created to perform the same function in Canada. Now, this site is aiming to perform the same function in the UK.
Open Source
The original delocator made the source code available in the hope that it might inspire others to create delocators in other countries. The code for this site has been updated to work with UK postal codes and to include the Google Map, to help in locating nearby cafes.
The code for this site needs cleaning up, and needs to be checked by someone who has a clue about internet security and/or the GPL (any offers of help please see get in touch!) before being released, but it is the aim for this site to be fully open source. Further technical information can be found here.
Contact
Visit the contact page to find out how to get in touch.