Six hundred of them in London by 1700, and Lloyd’s and the Stock Exchange both grew out of one
The Market Coffee House in Spitalfields holds a 4.3 from nine hundred and fifty-six people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is named after the institution that built the modern City.
1652
The first coffee house in London opened in a shed in a churchyard in Cornhill.
It was run by a servant called Pasqua Rosee, who had come from the Levant, and who hung a picture of his own head on the sign because he did not have a trade mark.
And he advertised the drink as a cure for gout, scurvy, dropsy and what he described as hypochondriack winds.
Within fifty years
There were five or six hundred of them in London.
And they were not cafes. They were institutions – and what made them extraordinary is that they were, for a penny, open to anybody.
You paid a penny at the door. You could sit all day. You could read the newspapers, which the house provided. And you could speak to any man in the room, regardless of who he was, because the convention of the coffee house was that rank was suspended at the door.
They were called penny universities, and the name was not a joke.
What came out of them
Nearly everything.
Lloyd’s began in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, which was frequented by shipowners and merchants, and where men began to insure each other’s voyages – and it became the largest insurance market in the world.
The Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan’s Coffee House, after the brokers were thrown out of the Royal Exchange for being too rowdy.
The Royal Society met in them. The newspapers were written in them. The auction houses started in them.
The entire financial machinery of this country was assembled by men sitting in rooms drinking coffee, for a penny, and arguing.
Why they exploded
Because of the water.
Coffee and tea are boiled. And in a city where the water would genuinely kill you – which we established at the John Snow in Soho, where six hundred people died from one pump – a hot drink was a safe drink.
And Cromwell’s government approved of coffee and disapproved of beer, and the timing was perfect.
A generation of men who had previously conducted their business drunk began conducting it caffeinated, and the results were immediate and visible, and the City has never gone back.
Verdict
Good room, cheap, honest number.
Go, and know that this building type invented the insurance industry, the stock market and the newspaper, and that it started in a shed.
Who was not allowed in
And it is worth saying plainly, because the coffee house is usually described as a great leveller, and it levelled exactly half the population.
Women could not enter most of them. There is a famous petition of 1674, purportedly from the women of London, complaining about coffee – and whether it was genuine or a satire written by men is disputed, but the exclusion it describes was entirely real.
So the institution that invented the newspaper, the insurance market and the stock exchange, and which prided itself on suspending rank at the door, suspended it for men only.
And every one of those institutions inherited the arrangement and kept it for three hundred years.
Harriet Collins is a high-output satirical journalist with a confident editorial voice. Her work demonstrates strong command of tone, pacing, and social commentary, shaped by London’s media and comedy influences.
Authority is built through volume and reader engagement, while expertise lies in blending research with humour. Trustworthiness is supported by clear labelling and responsible satire.
The footnotes are worth money. Sell separately.
The accuracy of the bureaucratic language suggests either personal trauma or obsessive research. Either way, my condolences.