An east London hipster café that only serves breakfast cereal was attacked by anti-gentrification protesters late Saturday.
The trendy Cereal Killer Café in the Shoreditch area of London had been criticized as a symbol of
inequality in the city, The Guardian reported. Protesters painted the word "scum" on the café's windows while some carried the heads of pigs and torches.
"It's senseless violence, isn't it? We've had some letters through the letterbox saying 'die hipsters' and stuff but nothing to this extreme," Gary Keery, 33, who founded the Cereal Killer Café with his twin brother, Alan, told The Guardian. "It just doesn't make sense."
Riot police were called upon to return over to the street in front of the café and one officer was injured when a bottle hit his face.
The Metropolitan police told the newspaper that a "criminal element within a group of several hundred people" attacked shops on Brick Lane and one protester was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage.
The anti-capitalist group, called F*** Parade, claimed responsibility for the riot that included about
200 people, according to the Daily Mail. The group said the protest was created to protest unaffordable housing prices in east London.
"We don't want luxury flats that no one can afford, we want genuinely affordable housing," the group said on its website. "We don't want pop-up gin bars or brioche buns — we want community. Soon this city will be an unrecognizable, bland, yuppie-infested wasteland with no room for normal (and not so normal) people like us."
London Mayor Boris Johnson had previously praised the breakfast cereal
restaurant in a December column in The Telegraph after a story on BBC Channel Four mocked the entrepreneurs.
"We should be hailing anyone who starts a business in this country; we should acclaim them for overcoming all the obstacles that government puts in their path — the rates, the employment law, the health and safety," Johnson said.
"It is a great thing to want to open a place of work in one of the poorest boroughs in Britain. We don't need taxpayer-funded journalists endlessly bashing the wealth-creators of this country, and sometimes we need to be a little less cynical and a bit more encouraging," he continued.