Every couple of days in Adelina Budakova's café, the main thoroughfare between the front door and the communal table at the back becomes the personal stomping ground of a project manager with a pair of airpods and an exceptionally loud voice.
 
After a morning spent typing, sitting on Zoom meetings and eking out an oat flat white for as long as possible, he'll hop on a phone call and begin to pace. Up and down, up and down he goes, staring vacantly out of the glass door while he discusses this week's sales targets, then turning on his heel and heading - past the cakes and the cookies and the busy coffee machine - back towards his laptop to check a spreadsheet, before turning and striding back towards the door.
 
"They're really focused on their meeting - they forget where they are," says Budakova. "If you say anything they get so p---ed of." f."
 
It's midday at Barista On The Other Side, a family-run café on Finchley Road, north London, and the lunchtime rush is under way.
 
Budakova, 43, has just breathed a sigh of relief as two people who arrived at 7am and looked as if they might bed in for the day have just left. The Budakovas have run a café on this road for 20 years. They moved here six years ago after running a smaller space across the street. At the time, it seemed a good idea to cater for the people who wanted to come into do a little work on their laptops. In the old location, a table hogger with a laptop had been "a killer", says Budakova. But they had space to accommodate the work-fromhome crowd now and felt sure people would be respectful. "[We thought] people would be normal - that they would understand they're coming into a coffee shop, not a free office space."
 
They installed plugs at every seat. This was 2018, right on the cusp of the Zoom era, in the days before the pandemic had rendered offices wastelands. It didn't take long for people to treat their lively little café like a cheap co-working space.
 
"We were being bombarded by them. They are not educated whatsoever that this is a business," says Budakova, a mother of two who runs the business with her husband Tony. "We started to lose regular customers because the atmosphere inside was becoming like an office. So we removed the plugs."
 
" As you might expect, that didn't go down well. "They began to get really p---ed of.f. We started to get really bad reviews because of it - not judging us on the service, on coffee or food, but we were getting judged on removing the plugs."
 
The Budakovas are among a growing number of cafés on the front line of a daily battle against the laptop brigade with their lust for free Wi-Fi and a well-priced americano. Last week, two cafés - Milk & Bean in Newbury, and The Collective in Caversham - said they had begun to impose limits on people using their space to work in. Customers at Milk & Bean can use a laptop for an hour a day and only on weekdays. At The Collective, you can't use a laptop between 11.30am and 1.30pm. Its manager, Alex Middleton, told the BBC the policy was about finding a "balance" that "doesn't compromise us losing money".
 
"We are a small independent business, so we need to keep those tables busy and turned around," he explained. "We can't have people hogging the tables and we don't want to disrespect people that come in with laptops either."
 
Chris Chaplin, the owner of Milk & Bean, said laptop use had led to "a lower turnover and quite a low spend compared with people that aren't on laptops", adding: "It also brings the vibe of the place down with people on laptops."
 
Another café - the Fringe and Ginge in Kent - banned laptops earlier this year after a customer asked staff to be quiet during a work call. Budakova recognises that particular brand of arrogance well. At its peak, she says, the work-from-café crowd became "extremely demanding". "Open the door, close the door, can you lower the volume, it's really loud, I'm having a meeting."
 
She must have felt like telling them to take their meeting elsewhere. "But you can't really say that." The only option was to impose some ground rules. Today, 12 of the 50 seats available in the café are for laptop users. Polite signs at each spot inform you whether this is a laptop-free zone or if you're welcome to sit and work for 90 minutes.
 
It works relatively well, though she still has to battle daily with people who want to occupy a seat for longer or set themselves up on a different table. "Can you see the atmosphere right now? It's nice." It is - bustling and warm, with a couple of people on laptops while most tables are filled with people catching up and the odd one enjoying a solo lunch. "It [had] changed completely. There was no sound of chatting. There were just people with laptops. It was like death, like going into an office."
 
" Even now, however, some people still treat the space like their home ffice, setting up a full work station when they arrive. "They bring all sorts of props," she says.
 
In nearby West Hampstead, one café manager (who asked not to be named) says the only solution she has found to deal with the issue is to restrict laptop users to the small number of stools in the window, so as not to give up valuable table space. "It gets pretty busy during lunchtime so, before they sit down, we ask if they're planning to work on their laptop and if we have the window seat free we offer them that. If they want a table they have to understand that we need to rotate the tables if we're busy."
 
It doesn't always go down well.
 
"Some of them leave, some complain." Complaints can be fatal for independent businesses. The Budakovas have battled a slew of negative Google reviews from indignant laptop users. One writes she needed to make "an important 20-minute work call on my laptop" and was interrupted. The owners' reply says it all: "We're sorry you feel this way but this is completely untrue. You came in, sat down and started your video call meeting without ordering or talking to anyone. No one came near you for over an hour and when approached by our staf f and asked for your order, you shouted: 'I'm in a meeting'." Charming.
 
At the nearby café and health food store Local Coffee and Grocery, people regularly occupy a seat in the tiny, cosy dining area all day. "Some customers take one coffee and they're sitting there morning until evening," says Nazir Mohtad, who has worked for the business for two years. "It's like it's their office. One coffee. Just one coffee all day." Does he ever ask them to move on? "No," he says. And you can't blame him given the way some react.
 
In a bid to put the issue to bed for good, some coffee shops now operate a hard no laptops policy. Common Ground in north-east London has been a "laptop- and tablet-free space" since October 2020. Announcing the shift, the café said on Instagram: "We want to be a social place, not a workspace. We want to protect our revenue at this vulnerable time. We want to pay our team a wage they can live on." It sounds reasonable; one disgruntled reviewer declared it "officious".
 
It's a different kettle of f ish, of course, for chains, which owing to their scale are better able to absorb the cost of hordes of customers ordering a croissant and a coffee and proceeding to fill a seat for the best part of a day.
 
At the branch of Gail's opposite Mohtad's café on Monday (surely among the most popular days to work from home) three tables in a row are occupied by people on laptops, headphones clamped firmly on. Aminur Rahman, working behind the counter, says they welcome the people who flock in every day, working from the café, often until closing. "Obviously we don't mind because a café is a nice environment to work in," he says. "We treat them just like a regular customer. I'm not sure about other companies but, for example, if they don't buy anything we don't get annoyed. So yeah, some people literally just sit here and work." That's all very well for Gail's, but for people like the
 
Budakovas, seat hogging has real consequences.
 
At the back of Barista On The Other Side, there is a table near the water dispenser. Occasionally people will install themselves next to it without ordering, pour a glass of water and simply "open their own sandwich". The day someone asks to use the microwave to heat up their container of leftover spag bol might be the final straw.