The Honourable Tradition of the Coffee-House

 

Situated in St Michael's Alley in the City of London

 The coffee house is a centuries-old institution and indeed, I discover in my search for historical facts about this venerable custom, that they existed for centuries in the Muslim Ottoman regions before spreading to Christian Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, introduced by merchants, migrants and missionaries as they journeyed on their different paths to enlightenment. The first was established in St Mark’s Square in Venice in 1657 when Florian Francesco opened Caffe Florian [still famous today] and only five years later came the second, opened by Pasqua Rosee, a Greek, who opened up Britain’s first coffee-house in St. Michael’s Alley in the City of London although an alternative source claims the first English coffee-house was opened in Oxford in 1650 with Pasqua Rosee following in 1652 and London’s second, The Rainbow, in Fleet Street in 1653.

Armenians were important in the establishment of the first coffee-houses/cafes in Paris, at the St Germain Fair in 1671, and also in initiating Vienna's first kaffeehaus in 1685. Unlike in taverns, also growing in parallel popularity, there was no intoxication involved though there was the delicious stimulus of coffee-drinking in spaces specifically designed to make it available and fashionable for those who could afford it. This wealthy, or comfortably off, coffee-loving cohort included predominantly professional, wealthy and/or educated men who usually shared a love of talking, discussing, arguing, conducting business transactions. And coffee-houses became their sanctuaries, providing opportunities for political discussion and debate and, importantly, for being seen in fashionable places. 

Caffe Florian, Piazza Marco, Venice 2020 open for 300 years

 

 

Cafe Frauenhuber, Vienna, the oldest continuously open
cafe in the city since 1834. 
Both Mozart and Beethoven ate and performed here.

 

Although coffee-houses claimed to admit anyone, in practice, women were excluded, or they excluded themselves, from spaces and discussions which were not, by general consent, considered appropriate for respectable women. Interestingly, in 1673 the ‘Women’s Petition Against Coffee’ was issued, claiming that coffee-drinking made men ‘unfruitful’ and a pamphlet, ‘The Character of a Coffee House’, was published condemning the diversity of topics and the free thought which occurred in coffee-houses. Nonetheless, by 1683 there were approximately 2000 coffee-houses in London alone and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coffee-house culture came to dominate civic life in European cities. As is the way with fashion, interest in coffee gatherings faded somewhat in early nineteenth century city life but bounced back magnificently in the kaffeehauser of great European cities like Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin in the 19th and early twentieth centuries where they were architecturally  and socially

Late 18th century coffee-house

important hubs of political and social  discussion. This extended wave of coffee culture ended, as did so many social structures, in the maelstrom of the First World War, not to be revived until the 1950s and 1960s in somewhat less majestic, but nonetheless, ubiquitous form. As a young woman in the late Fifties, teaching during the week, I ran a coffee bar on Saturdays, for a friend in business as a restaurant owner who wanted to cash in on the craze! The cultural conditions obtaining then in the U.K. included the growth of provincial universities, the post-war hunger for the 'new and the latest’ which included the development of the marvel of shiny new Italian espresso machines which became ‘a craze’!

Coffee culture continues to thrive today. The latest to open, among dozens in Bury St Edmunds, is Alema on High Baxter Street and is the reason for this article. Fabian, the owner from Loja in Ecuador, is Serious about coffee. He buys his Arabica beans directly from the family coffee farm run by his 

Fabian, owner of Alema Coffee with his splendid
gleaming brass roaster and grinder.

father in Loja, grinds and roasts the beans himself on some impressive-looking shiny brass machinery, funded by a bank loan. He is not only knowledgeable about coffee, he cares deeply about it, now bringing in his five year old son for part of Saturday to learn to share his passion. It goes without saying that his coffee [in hand-made mugs from a friend’s studio] is excellent and no more expensive than the coffee from at least 20 or 30 other outlets in town. And Fabian sends part of his profits back to the family farm.

Samuel Pepys 

There is a long article possible on the literary appreciation of coffee-house culture. Samuel Pepys enthused about his great pleasure in its ‘diversity of company and discourse’; Stefan Zweig, in his poignant 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday, remembered fondly the coffee-houses of Hapsburg Vienna as ‘actually a sort of democratic club, where every guest can sit for hours……. to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all, consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.’  While, as late as 2004, George Steiner described Europe as ‘made up of coffee-houses and cafes…. The cafe is a place for assignation and conspiracy, for intellectual debate and gossip, for the flaneur and the poet or metaphysician at his notebook.’

Stefan Zweig

My only comment on this wealth of history and culture is to suggest that the current phrase, 'coffee shop', does not in any way, suggest the intellectual richness of the earlier coffee-houses though it is still a much-valued meeting place where gossip and friendships are forged and maintained, newspapers consumed, romance can flourish and loneliness expiated.

The public conversation continues in today’s coffee-houses..

George Steiner in his Cambridge study

Thomas Garraway's Coffee-house, 
Exchange Alley, Cornhill.
Closed in the nineteenth century
after two hundred years of 
continuous business. 
One of the first cafes to sell tea also
which respectable ladies could drink in public.