Cafés in the United Kingdom London and Edinburgh

Oxford, the penny universities and a royal ban

England's coffee houses began in Oxford. Jacob, a Jewish entrepreneur, is usually credited with the first, at the Angel inn in 1650, though the historian Markman Ellis doubts the early date.⁴ Queen's Lane Coffee House, opened in 1654 by Cirques Jobson, a Levantine Jew from Syria, is described as the oldest coffee house in Europe still serving; it has been at its present site since 1970.⁵

A penny bought a cup of coffee, the newspapers and the conversation, which earned coffee houses the name penny universities.⁴⁶ Not everyone approved: The Women's Petition Against Coffee of 1674 claimed the drink left men impotent.⁴ By 1675 England had more than 3,000 coffee houses, and that year Charles II issued a proclamation to suppress them as places where "Idle and disaffected persons" met.⁷ The public outcry got it withdrawn.⁶

Glasgow: Camp Coffee and the Willow Tearooms

Glasgow's first coffee house opened in 1673, when Colonel Walter Whiteford set one up on the corner of Trongate and Saltmarket.⁸ Two centuries later the city bottled its own coffee. Camp Coffee, made in Glasgow by Paterson & Sons since the late 19th century, is a syrup of sugar and water with 25% chicory extract and 4% dried coffee extract.⁹

Its label shows a seated Gordon Highlander and a Sikh soldier under the motto Ready Aye Ready; a mid-century redesign removed the tray the Sikh carried, and since 2006 he sits beside the Highlander with a cup and saucer of his own.⁹

The city's best-known tearoom opened in October 1903, when Kate Cranston launched the Willow Tearooms at 217 Sauchiehall Street, with interiors by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald.¹⁰ Its first-floor Room de Luxe was the main draw. The building was bought in 2014 to prevent a forced sale, restored over four years, and reopened as working tearooms in July 2018.¹⁰

Bracchis: Italian cafés in the Welsh valleys

From the 1890s, emigrants from the Apennines, many of them from the town of Bardi, opened cafés, ice cream parlors and fish and chip shops across Wales.¹¹ Giacomo Bracchi, who reached London in 1881 as an organ grinder and moved to Wales by way of Newport, gave his name to the lot: Bracchis served coffee throughout the south Wales valleys.¹² His arrival coincided with the temperance movement, and Italians opened temperance bars at the time.¹²

Wales had more than 300 Italian cafés before the Second World War, and eleven are still run by the same families.¹¹ The original Caffe Sidoli in Ebbw Vale, from the ice cream business Benedetto Sidoli of Bardi founded in the early 20th century, still serves ice cream, Italian coffee and snacks.¹²

London and Edinburgh

London is where the country's largest coffee chain began. Bruno and Sergio Costa, whose family had moved from Parma in the 1950s, opened a roastery on Fenchurch Street in 1971 to supply caterers, and their first shop followed in 1981 on Vauxhall Bridge Road.¹³ Whitbread bought the business in 1995, and Coca-Cola completed its purchase in January 2019 for $4.9 billion.¹³

The city is also home to the International Coffee Organization, set up under the United Nations after the 1962 International Coffee Agreement and founded in London in 1963.¹⁴ Its headquarters are at 222 Gray's Inn Road.¹⁴

Edinburgh's first coffee house opened in 1673, run by John Row in a tenement called Robertson's Land on the west side of what is now Parliament Square. Within four years it was shut, because the Scottish Privy Council suspected its customers of subversive talk.⁸

The beans reached Edinburgh by way of London or the port of Leith, imported by merchants of the British and Dutch East India companies. The city's coffee houses became places of business, where auctions sold everything from furniture and houses to ships, horses and bank shares.⁸