George Bernard Shaw said that England and America are two countries divided by a common language. Coffee brings us together.

I’m writing this at home with a coffee in a Jane Austen mug from her house museum in Hampshire, U.K. It’s possible she had coffee (more likely tea), but not in a mug such as this one, clearly designed for coffee. Last week, in London, I had some wonderful coffee in very nice places. My head is still somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, but I’m back, contemplating coffee on both sides now. Coffee is big in London. Ubiquitous tea drinking has long given way to high coffee consumption and, in my experience, Londoners are quite knowledgeable about their brews. I can’t speak for the rest of the U.K, but some of the best coffee I’ve had was in my mugs this past week and in places that delighted me.

But first, history. Coffee appeared in London in public spaces first in 1652 at the Jamaica Wine House near what is now the financial heart of the city, and in private at Oxford University, brought by Greek or Cypriot students. Soon coffee’s popularity led to the establishment of coffee houses such as Lloyd’s, where shipping information was conveyed by merchants awaiting goods from far-flung places. Lloyd’s became Lloyd’s of London, the most famous of insurance companies, whose start was “gambling” (meaning exchanges of money over arrival and safety of cargo) fueled by coffee. In coffee’s English heyday, coffeehouses were like pubs, places where men spent much of their nonproductive time. There was a satirical broadsheet said to be written by women asking that coffee be banned as it supposedly weakened men’s fulfillment of their “marital duties.” 

England’s turn to tea is a colonial story, like so many. When Robert Fortune, a British botanist, dressed as a Chinese mandarin, absconded from China to India in 1848 with small shoots of camellia sinensis, he helped create the tea industry in British-ruled parts of India. Promoting tea as a colonial crop, the British encouraged its consumption and coffee began to fade. Tea with sugar from British-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean became the drink of choice. Later, coffee in revolutionary America was encouraged as tea came to symbolize British rule, and there was of course that costumed “tea party” in Boston Harbor. It all comes together.

But there I was a few days back, with the aroma of good coffee everywhere in London. On my first visit in the early 1960s, coffee was burnt and sad, having sat in urns all day. No wonder no one drank it black and “caff” tea, though sometimes as muddy as the coffee, was a better option. Now there is every kind of coffeehouse, serving awfully good coffees, if not offering shipping information or luring men away from their wives (who are probably in cafés themselves, writing memos on laptops or scribbling in journals). 

I’ve accumulated at least as many favorite cafés in London as I have here, and I’m beginning to see some connections and lessons they might have for each other. If anyone’s going across the pond and wants more suggestions, many more, just get in touch. I can also recommend a few great places to eat.

Watch House

In general, I avoid chains, preferring independent enterprises with individual characters and flavors. In England I don’t go to Caffès Nero or Costa because there are many better options. But Watch House’s brew quality and consistency override my main objections to multiples. 

The first Watch House café was established in 2014. I asked our server about the name and she said that older cemeteries had “watch houses” in which guards resided to prevent grave desecration and robberies. The first café was near the Bermondsey cemetery in South London in a 19th century watch house. Each Watch House is different, making the most of its building and environment and belying the banal “chain” sameness that keeps me away from such places. 

Where I encountered Watch House was Hampstead Heath, the huge expanse of rolling hilly meadows and forested areas in North London that is a perfect retreat from the crowds and dust of Oxford Street and the throngs of tourists at the British Museum. We almost didn’t see Watch House and nearly chose another chain café whose theme and charitable activity is support for those released from incarceration. But my friend said “Wait! There’s another one next door!” so we settled in to have Watch House’s excellent coffees at a pleasant sidewalk table. 

Watch House roasts its own beans, almost all at medium roast (to my taste), and bakes almost all its pastries (a particularly good buttery financier pastry for me) at a bakery in central London. The coffee I had as a drip cup was grown in Yunnan, China, and hit high and fruity on the palate. 

I did say that each Watch House’s design is unique. This one was clean, high-ceilinged and with blonde, scuffed wood floors, pale furnishings and lots of light. In fact, its minimalism reminded me of the Blue Bottle branch in Harvard Square, with open space and floor-to-ceiling windows and light wood furnishings. The comparison can go further: Both are chains with persistently good coffees. Watch House has a wider selection of foods, what the Brits call “more-ish.” I’ll go back for more.

Prufrock CaféPrufrock Café and I go back a long way. Prufrock (think T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the line “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”) is a coffee destination in Clerkenwell on Leather Lane. This is an old (what isn’t old here?) market street, a 20-minute walk from the British Museum and near Exmouth Market Street and a haven for excellent grub (my destination there is Moro, a Spanish/North African/Eastern Mediterranean restaurant). Leather Lane used to be a street market of stalls offering used clothing and cheap household goods, but today its stalls offer foods from tacos to Tunisian brik to barbecued pork rolls. It’s supposed to be pedestrians only, but watch out for mopeds and scooters. 

Prufrock has some of my favorite coffees and nice breakfasts and lunches. There are a few outdoor tables, but most seating is inside. It’s cheerful but simple in decor with industrial pipes along the ceiling and plain wood floors (I sense a pattern here as well as at home: A preference for weathered wood …) The staff is cheerful and patient as you make your way through the menu.

Most of the coffees are from James Hoffman’s roastery, Square Mile, a line that appears in many London cafés. (For fun, watch some of his informative and entertaining videos). But you have choices of beans at Prufrock. Try the guest roaster, which might be The Barn from Berlin or UnCommon from Amsterdam. I’m fond of the pour-over coffees but was surprised this time to discover that there is a high-tech pour-over machine in service. I remembered the fine spiraling movements of the barista’s arm as she circled the V60 filter with a thin drizzle of hot water over the grounds. Hmm, I thought, but this cup was absolutely delicious, so I will call it “industrial-artisanal”; a robotic “hand-made” coffee. 

If I were to offer a local equivalent to Prufrock, it would have to be a combination that adds up to its coffee and ambiance – for the former, perhaps, the excellent roasts of Intelligentsia on the edge of Belmont and Cambridge. For mood and service, perhaps Imagine on Huron Avenue. But we lack an equivalent for the locale, a bustling street of food stalls. 

While espresso-based drinks, even matcha lattes, exist in London and probably elsewhere in the U.K., the presence of fine-tuned drip coffees almost everywhere there made this drinker happy. Here, some cafes offer espresso-only, and thus only an Americano is on offer for a sustained drinking session. Not my cup of coffee. 

Now I am home with that Jane Austen coffee mug and there’s no contradiction. A mug from a tea-infused English past can hold the good coffees of Cambridge and Somerville.

About The Author

Corky White

Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.

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