Where modern office work began

Originally published March 2022.

I love coffee. I love spending time in great cafes.

So I have always been curious about the numerous plaques around the City of London marking the site of 17th-century coffee houses.

Coffee houses were clearly of historical importance. Indeed, at one point there were over 1,000 coffee houses in the capital.

But when I first moved to London around 20 years ago, there was scant evidence of a coffee culture. And if coffee houses were a key part of London’s history, where are the grand, historical cafes to rival those of Paris, Vienna or Budapest?

What then were the coffee houses? Why did they matter? What happened to them? And where are their decedents?

Well, the key point about London’s coffee houses is that they were really about the coffee.

Having recently been imported via Constantinople, coffee may have been novel. Drinking it might have felt very modern and metropolitan. And it might have been addictive. But those of us accustomed to today’s flat whites would not have liked what passed for coffee in the late 1600s. Indeed, people at the time did not necessarily like it.

If people did not come for the coffee, what did they come for?

They came for news, gossip and connections. Coffee houses provided access to information and access to networks.

As Ben Wilson says in his excellent book, Metropolis, “News, in late 17th-century London, was becoming a valuable commodity and the coffee house became the primary hub of news.”