My heart sinks as I approach Birmingham New Street station, on a quest to find "cafe society" in the heart of England. The clouds are thunderous, rain is falling, the temperature is dropping. Convinced that I would be spending the day eating and drinking in the sunshine, I have brought sunglasses but no jacket. My first stop will have to be Primark.
It had all seemed so different a couple of days earlier, having dinner on the pavement in London's Ferrari-filled South Kensington: a hearty French meal served in warm evening sunshine by a perfectly turned out middle-aged waiter in a street full of elegant women walking small dogs. It could have been Nice. Britain, I was sure, had finally become truly European, and we were now fully-fledged members of cafe society.
Was a damp day in Birmingham about to explode my hypothesis?
Happily, an hour later, the storm has abated, the sun is shining and Philip Singleton, assistant director of city centre development and design, is standing beside the canal in the trendy Westside area hymning the new Birmingham.
"Birmingham's always been a very interesting, vibrant place," he says, "but it was very different 18 years ago when I arrived here. It's a much more civilised place now, and you civilise a place via its streets and squares, widening pavements, pedestrianising streets, and encouraging good, active shops."
The aim is to create a "liveable city". Birmingham is twinned with Lyon and, as it embarks on a 20-year regeneration programme called the Big City Plan, it is consciously trying to emulate its French sibling. Singleton points out a bridge with shops over the canal which, a trifle ambitiously, he thinks resembles the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
"Bars, cafes, shops and clubs. It's verging on a 24-hour economy, and the benefit is more people, so you get natural policing," he says. This "natural policing" is what the government was after when it introduced 24-hour drinking in 2005, though figures suggest the hoped for decline in binge drinking and associated violence has failed to materialise.
But in truth not much natural policing is needed this lunchtime in Birmingham as the canalside bars are fairly empty. UK-style cafe society is less well rooted than its continental counterpart; we Anglo-Saxons still have a mental block about lunch.
Outside Costa coffee, five BT marketing executives are having a meeting. They bear out one of Singleton's points: execs are mobile now, Wi-Fied up, freed from their offices and animating city centres. "Cafes are now their offices," he says. "You don't even have to buy a coffee." These BT execs have come from all over the UK, preferring to meet rather than video conference, and doing so in Birmingham because it's a convenient midpoint. Do they think we are moving to a cafe society? Is Birmingham the new Lyon? "Well, the crime rates are similar," says Russell Cartwright, tapping away on a laptop. "Cafe culture is not going to bite in this country because it rains all the time. Also, we work harder than the French and we haven't got the same palate, so we don't really appreciate the coffee. It's a facade.
"The UK doing cafe culture is a bit like watching your dad dance," he says. "We're never really going to carry it off with any aplomb and sophistication like the French. The cafe culture in France is different from the one here. In the UK, it is very much the Starbucks culture. It's been transmitted from America, rather than trying to replicate the French version, which is much more relaxed."
The irony of us trying to decide whether we want American-style or French-style coffee shops is that, as Markman Ellis, author of The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, says - we had them first. "The continental notion of the cafe was inspired by a British idea. When the first coffee houses opened in Rome in the late 17th century, they were very much thought of as an imitation of a British model," he says.
Cafe culture, English-style, began in the 17th century and was associated with radical politics, but its Johnsonian heyday came in the 18th century. "Coffee houses then were very different to what we now think of as 'cafe culture'," says Ellis. "They were indoors, for a start, usually on the first floor of a townhouse; egalitarian, but you'd rarely find women there. It was more like a club, and they were closely associated with news and debate - two aspects which seem a long way from the Starbucks experience."
Another chronicler of cafe life, Adrian Maddox, author of Classic Cafes, has written lovingly of the generation of cafes, many of them run by Italians and Greeks, that sprang up in the UK in the 1950s, almost all of which have now disappeared with the corporatisation of the high street. He argues that those unpretentious, but often beautiful, establishments were a key agent of social change.
"Classic cafes were vital to the sub-cultural life of postwar Britain," says Maddox. "Throughout the 60s London dictated youth culture to the rest of the world, and the origins of this ascendancy can be traced back directly to the activities in the cafes of the 1950s. Music, fashion, film, advertising, photography, sex, crime, the avant garde ... The cafes were the creative enclaves where it was all honed. They added an impassioned European vibrancy to Britain's deflated postwar social, artistic and commercial scene."
He believes these caffs had a life which the new wave of high-street cafes lack. "What we have now is just a pale imitation of the culture that's been going on in Europe for a century," he says. "On the continent, they have little cafes which sell simple food and cheap wine, and connect to street life and the passagiatta, that evening walk families make together. Here it's just a leisure opportunity for big corporations.
"They're selling you a lifestyle offering on the pavement, a chance to eat beside some British dogshit."
"Proper cafe culture should be about individuality," says the architect Will Alsop. "You need good people to create a good cafe or restaurant. It should be a place where people exchange stories."
He paints a lovely picture of cafe culture as a state of mind. "What I love about Italy," he says, "is that on a nice day you can see two men pull a small table outdoors, whack a cloth and a bottle of wine on to it, and start a conversation about their families - even in the ugliest part of town. People are able to transcend their surroundings. Here in Britain we are more dependent on beautiful views."
Fernando Freitas, managing partner at La Tasca, a tapas bar on busy Broad Street, hails from Portugal. He says that there cafes and restaurants are an organic part of society; here they are a place to go occasionally. "Here it's work, work, work," he says, "and on the one day you've got off you're trying to make the most of your spare time."
The bar is busy in the evenings and at weekends, he explains . But lunchtimes are usually quiet, and he has given up on breakfast altogether.
In Spain or Portugal, he says, regulars will often have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same place; the owner will know exactly what is wanted and have it on the table as a regular walks in; lunch costs €3 (£2.40). Lunch at La Tasca sets me back £12.50 - without wine. It's a once-a-week treat, not part of daily life.
The physical separation of work and leisure is what strikes me most about Birmingham compared with a continental city. The canalside bars and restaurants have been built in clusters. In Brindley Place, one of the classiest developments, the chains form an unbroken sequence: Strada, Pitcher and Piano, Slug and Lettuce, Cafe Rouge. It could be anywhere - except Lyon.
By contrast, few of the squares in the centre of the city have shops or cafes. People sit beside fountains eating sandwiches. What a missed opportunity. In any European city, these great public spaces would be throbbing with life - and large, open-air cafes where supercilious waiters would be serving overpriced coffees. The UK is edging towards street life, but in an overstructured way. The Big City Plan may need some small city imperfections.
"Every good city has a bit of shit," says Michael Parkinson, professor of urban affairs at Liverpool John Moores University. "Otherwise they're dull." He tells me to head for Digbeth, in Eastside, which he calls "funky"; the locals, however, warn against it, suggesting everyone will be drunk by 6pm.
Parkinson argues that, even though our glitzy new cities sometimes lack character, a revolution has taken place in the past 10 years: the pub-dominated town centres of a generation ago have been banished, and the future will belong to an active cafe culture, which will become more individualised. "We do need to learn a sense of place," he says. "But I still see the glass as being half-full rather than half-empty. It's a work in progress."
Italian-born chef Giorgio Locatelli, who is based in London, makes the glass sound even fuller. "When I came here in 1985, nobody ate outside. Some pubs had gardens, but they were enclosed, not looking out on to the street. We've come a long way since then.
"Of course, in parts of Italy you can eat outside for seven or eight months of the year, so you can afford to develop it; in the UK, you maybe get 20 days when you can eat outside. But we have definitely become more continental, and the quality of food that we serve in the street is higher."
Locatelli is, however, no out-and-out advocate of continentalisation. He says we should treasure good pubs, which Italians revere in the way we adore their piazza cafes.
Alsop, despite his belief that cafe culture is a state of mind that we have not yet grasped, says architects are beginning to adapt. "There is a tendency to make the ground floors open, and to enable people to spill outside if the weather is good. I refuse to call it a 'piazza' or 'plaza', by the way: it's a square, and it always will be."
But architecture critic Jonathan Meades is unconvinced. "Who are the 'we' who are aspiring to cafe culture anyway?" he demands. "I suspect it's the aspiration of a very small number of people. Architects these days have this strange tic where they cannot come up with a model for a project without imagining people sitting outside on a bench or under a parasol. They seem to automatically assume that what works in Tuscany will also work in Barnsley.
"If you look at Paris or the big German cities, you will find that cafes play such a large role because people have much less private space. Cafes tend to work where there is a concentration of people - they offer escape for people who don't have access to outdoor space. Demographically, Britain doesn't work like that."
By early evening I am in Birmingham's famous Bull Ring, its old commercial hub, now redeveloped with dozens of busy cafes and a space-age Selfridges. Perversely, what attracts me is the Bull Ring Tavern, which looks unchanged since about 1962. Here, surely, is one of Parkinson's gritty, shitty bits. I can't resist going in and it doesn't disappoint. The average age of the regulars must be about 74 and almost before I'm through the door, I am buttonholed.
This is old Birmingham and, though one man says the architecture has undoubtedly improved, most lament what's been lost. "All the characters have gone," says John Lynch, who arrived in Birmingham in 1958. "There was a wonderful atmosphere. I thought the old Bull Ring was brilliant. You had the odd fight here, but nothing serious."
The decline of the greasy spoon and the pub is a disaster for these remnants of the 60s and 70s. One drinker says he now has to walk miles for his full English breakfast.
Lynch tried one of the posh new restaurants, once, he says. It was "a lovely bit of fish", but he'd had to ask for brown sauce and one of the roast potatoes was so hard he'd felt obliged to complain. "Eventually, the chef came out ..." the story is reaching its apogee.
"He asked: 'Is everything all right, sir'? 'No, it's not. The fish is lovely, the chips are lovely, but I cannot get me knife into this roast potato'. And do you know what he turned round and said to me? He said: 'If you lift up that roast potato, you'll find out it's a lemon! You're supposed to squeeze it on to your fish'."
His fellow drinkers laugh long and loud. Will our emerging cafe society hear such joyous sounds above the hum of laptops and chatter on mobiles?
· Additional reporting by Philip Oltermann
