The aroma of fresh strong Turkish coffee wafts through the door. Arabic music, the glitter of the geometric patterned ceiling and the ornate inlaid tables suggest Cairo, Beirut or Damascus. Cool, perfumed smoke curls into the air as attendants bring fresh charcoal to place on the tobacco burning in the hookahs beside each table. The lure of the East could not be more enticing.

Café Mirimar, one of Edgware Road’s temples to the oriental water pipe, was recently voted online as the best shisha café in London. Hundreds come every day to meet friends, drink coffee, gossip and draw on the long tubes that gurgle smoke flavoured with apples, cherry, honey or mint through the water of a shisha pipe, or narghile as it is also known.

Their world is about to disappear. On Sunday, the last charcoal will be lit, the last shisha will be brought to the table and a culture that stretches from Morocco all the way back to ancient Persia will be snuffed out.

Only at a few cramped tables packed under the awning outside the doorway will a lucky handful of smokers still be able to pull on their old traditions.

“A lot of them are crying and asking, ‘My God, what shall we do?’ We don’t know what will happen,” says Fatimah Hamond, the young Egyptian manager. “For a month they have been counting down the days. Some are fighting to make reservations outside. I don’t know how we will survive.”

Shisha, at £6 a pipe, accounts for 80 per cent of the café’s income. Almost all the customers, young and old, men and women, English and Middle Eastern, come to smoke a hubble-bubble, as the Victorians quaintly called the hookah. When the ban comes into force, Hammond will have to dismiss all but one of the six charcoal and tobacco attendants who service the shisha pipes day and night.

The Mirimar is one of scores of Middle Eastern cafés and restaurants that have turned a stretch of Edgware Road into London’s most vibrant centre of Arabic culture and cuisine. Each weekend they attract 70,000 to 80,000 people to their neighbourhood – many of them tourists from the Middle East looking for familiar food and music, many of them also young Britons keen to try shisha and sip the strong thick black coffee.

An association of 600 businesses has banded together in a last-ditch attempt to persuade the new Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, to stay the national smoking ban, which will of course include shisha. They say it will drive hundreds of people out of business, ruin a thriving neighbourhood and spoil one of the few innocent enjoyments of people who do not drink, do not take drugs, do not fight or brawl and have nowhere else to go.

Yoger Shah, a young British Indian businessman, is aghast at the coming ban. He has made the Mirimar his virtual office for the past eight years. He arrives at 10am, orders his first shisha and then, for the rest of the day, brokers mortgages on his laptop for clients he meets in the café or who are brought round by circles of friends. “Where should I go? I don’t drink – I can’t go to a bar or a club. We’ll be literally lost. We can sit and drink coffee here, but it won’t be the same without shisha: it’s like going to a pub and not having a drink.”

Many like him are regulars. He has learnt a smattering of Arabic and loves the convivial atmosphere. “You can put up a canopy in a garden but it’s no fun in the British weather smoking shisha while the rain comes down. And you can’t sit outside in winter.”

Most shisha cafés and restaurants are hoping to survive with hookahs on the pavement. That may keep them going in summer. “But who’s going to sit out there in winter?” Hammond asks. “And how can I ask them to hurry up? People take a pipe for an evening: I can’t tell them they have only 20 minutes.”

Across the road, the Sidi Maarouf, an upmarket Moroccan restaurant, will also be hit by the ban. People come for a Moroccan meal and to smoke shisha afterwards. “We’re going to lose money,” says Samira Ballali, the manager. “Some of the men can sit outside to smoke. But women who enjoy shisha want their privacy.” Her staff, she admits, are ambivalent about the ban. “They don’t like it when people blow smoke in their faces. But they know that one in five asks for shisha.”

The Edgware Road petition is asking for a special exemption on the grounds that the ban will have a disproportionate effect on the culture and social practices of a particular ethnic minority – which is not in keeping with the Government’s 2004 White Paper that said the proposed measures would not disadvantage any group, although it recognised the special case of restaurants where hookahs are smoked.

Hookahs, the petition argues, produce no sidestream smoke. And they are in any case smoked in places where children are not allowed. It is not only those from the Middle East who are dismayed at the ban. “Young English people love shisha,” Ballali says. “Many come here just for that. They’ve probably travelled in the region. Or they like the flavours.” She laughs at the suggestion that many may think the pipes are filled with hashish.

Shisha smoking goes back centuries: Persian miniatures often depict a smoker drawing tobacco through a water-pipe. The Victorians also acquired a taste for shisha: the caterpillar spends most of his time puffing on his hookah as he talks to Alice in Wonderland.

But it is only in the past 20 years that the fragrant fumes have wafted along Edgware Road. The café owners are still hoping for special exemption, but most are prepared for the worst.

However, some shops are already looking ahead. Many of the hookahs on sale now come with a little suitcase, and can be dismantled and carried around. “You can take them with you for picnics in the park,” an attendant in Al Mustafa says. “Maybe that’s the way people will smoke them in the future.”

Explore Health

• Expert Advice

• Health Features

• Mental Health

• Alternative Medicine

• Child Health

• Health Club