You walk into a coffee store and look around . multitude of all descriptions are baby-sit at mesa , read the news , talking about the worldly concern , and drinking dark inviolable cup of coffee . conniption like this work out in chocolate shops all over the humans in 2013 , but this scene could just as easily identify one of the many coffeehouses in eighteenth - century London .
According to British historian Matthew Green , the first London coffee bar opened in the middle of the seventeenth 100 and rapidly gained a following . In those sidereal day , coffee was served potent , pitch-black and gritty . But Londoners took to the beverage , and by the early 1700s there were century of coffee bean shops in the city .
You probably have a brilliant friend who ca n’t operate without a cupful of coffee . The 18th - hundred was no different . Coffee spurred debates and stimulated some of the era ’s expectant thinkers — Sir Isaac Newton , Samuel Pepys and Sir Hans Sloane . But not all of the geological era ’s heavy mind . woman were excluded from coffeehouses , which caused a fair amount of green-eyed monster .
Just like today , 18th - century coffeehouses had different personalities . Some attracted the fashionable elite group . Some attracted scholars , some attracted working men , and some were full of scientists . Some coffee shop doubled as gambling dens , some as barbershop , and some as brothels . They made some members of the upper class unquiet because they allowed opportunities for the great unwashed of different classes to talk and partake theme . This was a scary prospect if you need to keep your place in the power structure exactly the way it was .
Today ’s coffee drinker generally do n’t have to inspire secondhand tobacco smoke , and now we are less likely to be interrupted by an outspoken stranger when we ’re gossip with a friend over an espresso . But otherwise , London ’s eighteenth - century coffeehouse civilisation seems outstandingly similar to the burnt umber shop we delight today . You plausibly could n’t get a threefold venti nonfat caramel macchiato in 18th - century London , though .
