In pictures: Coffee houses of India

A waiter serves schoolgirls beneath a portrait of Rabindranath Tagore in the Indian Coffee House, Kolkata, India — Image caption,
Photographer Stuart Freedman's The Palaces of Memory is a journey into India via the Indian Coffee Houses - a national network of worker-owned cafes.

Set up in Bangalore in the late 1950s the co-operative quickly spread across the country.

Sri Kumar, a waiter. The Indian Coffee House, Jaipur

For the project, Freedman visited more than 30 of the most significant establishments in cities throughout India. Here, Mr Sri Kumar, a waiter at The Indian Coffee House in Jaipur.

Customers sit beneath a portrait of Rabindranath Tagore in the Indian Coffee House, Kolkata, India

The Indian Coffee House in Kolkata has been an institution for more than 50 years. It has been a place where politicians, activists and intellectuals have come to converse over a cup of coffee.

Men sit and talk in the Indian Coffee House, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, New Delhi.

In Delhi the cafe, first in central Connaught Place and then Janpath, is now at the top of a rather shabby shopping centre. It is still run by the Indian Coffee Workers Co-operative Society.

The interior of the Indian Coffee House, Kollam, India

"The Coffee House became for me an echo of the cosy fug of the English cafe, those greasy, Formica pavilions of post-war austerity," writes Freedman. (The Indian Coffee House, Kollam)

A rickshaw puller outside the Indian Coffee House, Kolkata,

"Rain, cigarette smoke and steamy windows. A place in a city where you could simply watch the world."

Waiters laugh and joke during a break, in the staff room of the Indian Coffee House, Kottayam, Kerala.

A book of the project, The Palaces of Memory: Tales from the Indian Coffee House by Stuart Freedman, is published by Dewi Lewis.