In 1652 a servant called Pasqua Rosee opened a coffee shack in this alley and hung his own head on the sign. The site of his second shop is now a Starbucks.
In 1652, in a shed in the churchyard of St Michael’s, Cornhill, a servant named Pasqua Rosee began selling coffee.
It was the first coffee house in London. He hung a sign over the stall, and the sign was a picture of his own head.
There is now a pub on the spot with twelve hundred reviews and a 4.3, and a plaque on the wall, and almost nobody in the alley has read it.
Who he was
Nobody entirely agrees. He has been described as Greek, as Armenian, as Turkish, as Dalmatian – and the honest answer is that the record is thin and contested and that he was, in the language of the time, simply foreign.
He was the servant of Daniel Edwards, a Levant Company merchant who had been trading in Smyrna, had acquired the coffee habit, and had brought Rosee back to England with him.
Edwards drank two or three dishes of it a day. His friends kept coming round to try it. So many came, so often, that it began to interfere with his home life – and rather than stop, he set his servant up in business.
The greatest institution in the history of London commerce began because a man could not get any peace in his own house.
The first advertisement
Rosee printed a handbill – The Vertue of the Coffee Drink – and it is the earliest known advertisement for coffee in England, and it is magnificent.
Coffee, he wrote, was excellent against the dropsy, the gout and the scurvy. It would help with scrofula. It would prevent miscarriage. And it was a most excellent remedy against the spleen, hypochondriac winds, and the like.
We have found this in three hundred and ninety articles and it never stops: everything behind a bar was sold, at some point, as a medicine.
He was reportedly shifting six hundred dishes a day.
Why it exploded
Cromwell.
The Puritan government was closing the theatres, banning the sports, and taking a very dim view of the alehouses – and coffee was regarded as sobering, industrious, and morally sound.
So while the taverns were being suppressed, the coffee houses were left alone, and by 1708 there were five or six hundred of them in London and Westminster.
They became the newsrooms, the debating chambers, the stock exchanges and the insurance markets of the city. Lloyd’s of London grew out of one. So did the Stock Exchange.
The entire financial machinery of the City that surrounds this pub was assembled by men sitting in coffee houses, and it happened because a Puritan regime disapproved of beer.
What it became
And this is the part that has to be said plainly.
The rebuilt house became the Jamaica Coffee House, and it became the address for men trading with the West Indies – sugar, and the colonies, and the ships.
Eighteenth-century London newspapers carry advertisements seeking information about escaped enslaved people, and they give the Jamaica Coffee House as the address to reply to.
That is in the record. It is not a footnote. It is what the room was used for.
The pub
Ten to twenty pounds. Dark, panelled, tucked down an alley you would never find by accident. A 4.3 across a real sample, and a wine bar in the cellar that has been there since 1869.
Verdict
Go, for the alley and the plaque and the sheer weight of it.
And then walk to Cornhill, where Rosee intended to open his second shop, and to Walbrook, where he lived with Edwards.
Both are Starbucks. Both of them. We are not making it up.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
