Too Many Callers

Coffee begins as the seed of a shrub from the highlands of Ethiopia. Dried, roasted until it darkens, ground and boiled, it makes a bitter black drink that keeps people awake. In the 1640s almost nobody in England had tasted it. Within a lifetime London had built a new kind of room around it, and those rooms changed how the city talked: who spoke to whom, where news was made, how ships were insured and shares were traded. It is a lot of history to hang on a seed. But the seed was always going to make the drink. The rooms came from something else the plant is good at, which is bringing visitors back.

The plant does this even to its pollinators. Some coffee flowers lace their nectar with a little caffeine, and in laboratory tests honeybees given nectar-strength doses were about three times as likely to remember a flower's scent the next day. Whether a London merchant is a kind of bee is a question for another article. Still, the story of what coffee did to London begins with exactly that problem: callers who would not stop coming back.

Daniel Edwards had the problem familiar to anyone who has owned the only decent coffee machine in an office. He was an English merchant who had traded at Smyrna, the Ottoman port on the Aegean now called İzmir, where coffee, as one Englishman put it, "had been used immemorially". When he came home to London around 1652 he brought the habit with him, and the means to keep it up: a servant called Pasqua Rosée, a Greek from Ragusa, the Adriatic city now called Dubrovnik, who made his coffee. Edwards drank two or three dishes at a time, two or three times a day.

His friends came round to try it. Then they came round again. One early account says the novelty drew such a crowd to his house that he lost "all the forepart of the Day". A merchant cannot do business with half the City, London's square mile of counting-houses and merchants, sitting in his parlour waiting for a dish of something black and bitter. So Edwards did the sensible thing. He set Pasqua up in business, in a shed in the churchyard of St Michael's, Cornhill, the street at the heart of the City's trade, and let the callers go and bother him there.

That is the origin of the London coffee-house: a way of getting visitors out of the house. Conversation that had happened in a private parlour, by invitation, now happened in a public room that anyone could walk into for a penny. What came of that was a chain of consequences running from a churchyard shed to the Stock Exchange, and almost none of it was planned by anybody.

A man who put his own face on the sign

Pasqua Rosée printed a handbill, the first advertisement for coffee in England. It is headed "The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink", announces it "First publiquely made and sold in England, by Pasqua Rosee", and tells you, at the bottom, where to find him: "in St. Michaels Alley in Cornhill … at the Signe of his own Head." London shops hung out pictures of what they sold, or of bells and swans and angels. Pasqua hung out a picture of himself.

Coffee, the handbill explains, grows "only in the Deserts of Arabia" (it is a highland shrub, not a desert one, and it first grew wild in Ethiopia, though Yemen, across the Red Sea, was where the world bought it) and is "drunk generally throughout all the Grand Seigniors Dominions", meaning the Ottoman sultan's empire. You dry the berry in an oven, grind it to powder and boil it with spring water, and drink about half a pint "as hot as possibly can be endured", fasting an hour before and an hour after. Do not worry, it adds: it "will never fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any blisters". It is good for digestion, and therefore "of great use to be taken about 3 or 4 a Clock afternoon, as well as in the morning". London was being sold the afternoon pick-me-up a century before anyone thought of afternoon tea.

It worked. Pasqua had "great Custom", and the first people to complain were exactly who you would expect: the publicans. The ale-house keepers petitioned the Lord Mayor against him on the grounds that he was not a freeman of the City, one of the members of its guilds who alone had the right to keep a shop there.

The solution was very English. Edwards's father-in-law, Alderman Thomas Hodges, one of the City's governing aldermen, had a coachman called Christopher Bowman, known as Kitt, who was a freeman. Kitt was made Pasqua's partner, and the paperwork was satisfied.

It did not last. The two fell out. Kitt set up a rival coffee-tent in the churchyard, and somebody, under the comic pseudonym "Adrianus del Tasso", wrote verses "To Mr. Pasqua Rosee, at the Sign of his own Head and half his Body, in St. Michael's Alley, next the first Coffee-Tent in London". They are partisan and very funny. Why, they ask, should Pasqua, who first broached "this Nectar for the publick Good", have to "call Kitt down from the Coach / To drive a Trade he understood / No more than you did then your Creed, / Or he doth now to write or read"? They urge him to hold out through the summer, because his face (meaning his sign) "Shall give the Coffee-Pot the Chace". They complain that Kitt has grown so proud as to spread his tent "Upon the Bodies of the Dead". A coffee war, fought in verse among the gravestones.

Pasqua lost. After 1658 there is no trace of him in London. One account says he ran away "for some Misdemeanour"; a story went round that he had gone to open a coffee-house in Holland or Germany. Kitt, meanwhile, did something wonderfully modern: he persuaded nearly a thousand of his customers to chip in sixpence each, and with the money turned his shed into a proper house. And he married Alderman Hodges's cook-maid.

Within twenty years London had more or less forgotten Pasqua. A satirical broadside of 1672 announced that "A Coachman was the first (here) Coffee made", while mocking a foreign seller's patter in broken English, "Me no good Engalash!" John Aubrey, the antiquary whose gossipy notes on his contemporaries were later published as Brief Lives, credited the first coffee-house to Bowman around 1680 and did not mention Pasqua at all. The man who brought the drink was written out of his own story, and the local partner, the one with the right papers, was written in. His sign did better than he did. Whether or not his face was the model, the turbaned head became a common sign in London: one historian of the coffee-houses counted more than fifty called the Turk's Head.

You may sit anywhere

What really changed was not chiefly the drink. Before the coffee-house, a Londoner who wanted somewhere to talk outside his own home had the tavern and the ale-house. Both ran on alcohol, and alcohol set the tone. James Howell, a prolific letter-writer and historian, noticed the difference in the late 1650s: apprentices and clerks, he said, used to take their "mornings' draught" in ale, beer or wine, "which by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, make many unfit for business"; now they took coffee instead, "this wakefull and civill drink". A pamphlet defending coffee-houses in 1675 put the economics plainly: in an ale-house "you must gorge yourself with pot after pot", but in a coffee-house, "for a penny or two, you may spend two or three hours, have the shelter of a house, the warmth of a fire, the diversion of company".

A penny, in other words, bought a seat for the afternoon and the right to join in. And it bought any seat. The rules that hung on coffee-house walls, in doggerel verse, said so in the first rule:

This was a genuinely odd idea in a society that cared intensely about who sat above whom. A pamphlet of 1665, The Character of a Coffee-House, describes the result with relish. "There's no respect of persons there." At one table a moneylender sits beside a swaggering gallant, then a virtuoso, a player, a country bumpkin, a busybody and a religious radical. They each order something different, tea, chocolate, coffee with sugar-candy, and the bumpkin, appalled, demands to know whether they are calling for drink "in Heathen Greek", asks for good old ale, and finally, fearing their Latin "may be treason", sends the boy for a constable. At the next table a knight, a dealer in old shoes and hats and an apprentice boy all argue at once, until a "pert mechanick blade" contradicts the lot of them. A self-styled wit tries to impress a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a Dutchman in turn, and gets "Sennor no", "Non par ma foy" and "Neen mynheer" for his trouble.

It is satire, but satire only works if the reader recognises the room: strangers of different ranks talking to one another as if that were normal. A ballad of 1667 may have given the place the name that stuck:

News, true and otherwise

A room where anyone can talk to anyone is a room where news travels fast. The same ballad was called News from the Coffe House, and its refrain was a sneer: whatever you heard there, "It cannot but be true". In the coffee-house they know who will win a sea-battle before the fleets engage. They know what the Sultan had for dinner last Sunday. A fisherman swears he caught a shoal of mackerel "That Parley'd all in Dutch". London had invented the rumour mill, and it had a penny entrance.

The news was not always nonsense, and in one year it was life and death. A man who was a schoolboy in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, remembered the regulars at Bowman's coffee-house. As soon as they came in, they looked round the room for anyone they knew and began by asking "how all was at their Houses". If nobody was sick, they sat together. Otherwise, "all sat at a distance from one another". The ordinary "how are things at home" had become a public health check.

The people who liked this new talk least were the people being talked about. In 1675 King Charles II, restored to the throne fifteen years earlier after the Cromwellian republic, issued a proclamation "for the suppression of coffee houses". It complained that tradesmen wasted their time in them, and, worse, that in such houses "divers false, malitious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majestie's Government". From 10 January 1676 nobody was to sell coffee, chocolate, sherbet or tea to be drunk on the premises.

It lasted eleven days. The proclamation was issued on 29 December; on 8 January, before it could bite, a second proclamation withdrew it, after an outcry from every party and some pointed remarks about lost revenue. Sir William Coventry, a politician who had served the king for years, had already made the most awkward point of all when the idea was first floated: under Oliver Cromwell, the coffee-houses were where the king's own friends had dared to speak more freely than anywhere else.

They had done politics from the start. In 1659, in the last unsteady months of the republic, a debating club called the Rota met at the Turk's Head in New Palace Yard, a stone's throw from Parliament, round an oval table built with a passage down the middle so that the proprietor, a man named Miles, could get through with the coffee. It settled its arguments with a wooden ballot box it called "our wooden oracle". A parliament with refreshments.

Not everyone was charmed. In 1674 The Women's Petition against Coffee complained that the drink made men as "unfruitful as the deserts where that unhappy berry is said to be bought", and that a husband sent out on an errand would stop on the way for a couple of cups. Women were not, by and large, customers, though some ran the houses: a Mary Stringar kept one in Little Trinity Lane in 1669.

Every room gets a subject

By the early eighteenth century there were, on one estimate, two thousand coffee-houses in London, and many had specialised. People with the same interests drifted to the same rooms, and the rooms took on the subject of their talk. A satirical guide of the period, A Brief and Merry History of Great Britain, which pretends to be written by a visitor who knew the coffee-houses of Constantinople, ran through them: the houses round the Temple, where the lawyers had their chambers, talked of "Causes, Costs, Claps, Demurrers"; Child's of tithes and rectories; Hamlin's of infant baptism and free will; Batson's of "the Prices of Pepper, Indigo, and Salt-Petre". The same visitor thought the coffee-houses were where Londoners got their slander, "for there one hears exact Accounts of every Thing done in the Town, as if it were but a Village". That is a fair description of what the penny had bought: a great city talking to itself like a village. Will's, in Covent Garden, was for poetry, and for John Dryden, the Poet Laureate, who had a chair by the fire in winter and on the balcony in summer; young men counted a pinch from his snuffbox an honour.

When Richard Steele, an Irish-born playwright and essayist, launched The Tatler, a paper published three times a week, in April 1709, he simply organised it by coffee-house. "All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from St. James's Coffee-house". The sections of one English newspaper began as rooms you could walk into. Two years later Steele and his friend Joseph Addison, the essayist with whom he co-founded The Spectator, gave that daily paper a narrator who makes the same rounds, smoking a pipe at Child's while he overhears "the Conversation of every Table in the Room". At Button's, another Covent Garden house, Addison set up a carved lion's head with an open mouth, designed (so the story goes) by the painter and engraver William Hogarth, to swallow letters from readers. The coffee-house had become the post box for the conversation as well as the place where it happened.

And because every man of business had his coffee-house, the coffee-house became his address. Jonathan Swift, the satirist who would later write Gulliver's Travels, told his friend Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella, to write to him at the St James's. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Victorian historian, said that if you wanted to find a gentleman in the 1680s you asked not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow.

The coffee-house keepers came to believe they owned the conversation. In 1729 they asked the government for a monopoly on news: a Coffee House Gazette, written by the customers themselves on brass slates or ivory tablets collected from the tables twice a day, because the newspapers were full of advertisements and foolish stories. A newspaper written by its readers was laughed at, and nothing came of it. They were about three hundred years early.

A lost-property notice

Lloyd's of London, the insurance market, began not with insurance at all but as an address.

The first time Edward Lloyd's coffee-house appears in print is in the London Gazette, the government's official newspaper, in February 1689. Somebody has had some watches stolen, and anyone with information is asked to bring it "to Mr. Edw. Loyds Coffee House in Tower-street", near the Tower and the river. It was a natural place to leave a message, because people who had anything to do with the port went there.

Lloyd understood what his customers wanted, and it was not mainly coffee. It was news of ships: which had arrived, which had sailed, which had been lost. He gathered it and wrote it out by hand in lists. After he moved to bigger premises on the corner of Lombard Street, the City's banking street, he held ship auctions there and installed a pulpit from which news and prices were read out. In 1696 he tried publishing a newspaper, Lloyd's News, three times a week; it came to an abrupt end in February 1697 after his printer added some text that brought a threat of libel.

The men who came to read the ship lists were exactly the men needed to insure a cargo, so the underwriters, the merchants who would take a share of the risk on a voyage for a fee, came too. Nobody founded Lloyd's of London. It accreted around the news, the way the poets accreted around Dryden.

Lloyd himself has one of the best exits in commercial history. Early in 1713, ill, he made his will. On 28 January he added a codicil leaving the lease of the coffee-house to his head waiter, William Newton. On 30 January Newton married Lloyd's daughter Handy. On 15 February Lloyd died. Make of that what you will.

In 1734 a later proprietor, Thomas Jemson, founded Lloyd's List, given over almost entirely to shipping. By the 1760s the old house had gone to the bad, with gambling and speculation, and in 1769 the serious underwriters decamped to Pope's Head Alley and a New Lloyd's Coffee House. In 1774 they moved into the Royal Exchange, the City's great trading hall, to do business purely as underwriters. When Parliament finally incorporated them in 1871, the Act still described them as the society "formerly held at Lloyd's Coffee House". The building is long gone; the coffee is still in the name.

There is a darker side to a good address, and it should be said plainly. Advertisements in the London Gazette gave Lloyd's coffee-house as the place to send word of enslaved people who had escaped, and the underwriters who met there insured slave ships and the people in them. The same room that could find a stolen watch could be used to find a person, and the same arithmetic of risk that covered a cargo of pepper covered a cargo of human beings. The coffee-house's openness was real, but it was open to whatever business walked in.

A minute and a half

A few streets away, the same thing happened to money. In 1698, when dealers in company shares were expelled from the Royal Exchange for being too rowdy, they simply moved into Jonathan's and Garraway's, two coffee-houses in Exchange Alley, a lane beside the Exchange. That year a broker called John Castaing began posting a list of stock and commodity prices at Jonathan's. A price sheet in a coffee-house is about as humble as the beginnings of a financial market can get.

Daniel Defoe, the journalist who wrote Robinson Crusoe, mapped the whole thing in 1719, with disapproval. The "kingdom of Exchange-alley", he wrote, could be walked round "in about a minute and a half": out of Jonathan's, round past Garraway's, into Birchin Lane, past the Sword-blade Bank, along Cornhill and back into Jonathan's again, "and thus having boxed your compass, and sailed round the whole stock-jobbing globe … you end just where you began." The entire British stock market fitted inside a ninety-second stroll.

In 1761 the brokers at Jonathan's formed a club of 150 members. In 1773 they put up their own building in Sweeting's Alley. They called it New Jonathan's. Then they renamed it the Stock Exchange.

The door closes

Look at how those stories end. The underwriters leave Lloyd's for subscribers' rooms. The brokers leave Jonathan's for a club with members. White's, which began as a chocolate-house anyone could enter (for sixpence, rather than a penny), became one of the most exclusive private clubs in London.

That is the arc. Coffee got conversation out of the private house and into a room anyone could enter. Once the talk was public it sorted itself by subject, and once it was sorted it became valuable: shipping news, stock prices, the verdict on a new play. And once it was valuable, the people who had it wanted a door that locked. Lloyd's and the Stock Exchange are what happens when the penny university grows up and starts charging fees.

As for the drink, it lost. The East India Company, the chartered company that ran England's trade with Asia, was far more interested in tea, and over the eighteenth century London's coffee-houses quietly became tea-houses, then taverns and chop-houses, or nothing at all.

St Michael's Alley is still there, a narrow passage off Cornhill, where Pasqua hung his own face over the door and Kitt pitched his tent among the dead. The building on the site is the Jamaica Wine House, a pub, so the ale-sellers got their corner back in the end. But there is a plaque on the wall, and it does not mention the coachman with the right papers. It reads: "Here stood the first London coffee house at the sign of the Pasqua Rosee's Head, 1652." The man London wrote out of the story within twenty years is back over the door, identified, as he always meant to be, by his own face.