London: The Biography полностью

Yet of course the most famous establishments of eighteenth-century London were the coffee houses. In fact, they found their origins in the middle of the previous century when, according to a contemporary note recorded in The Topography of London, “theire ware also att this time a Turkish drink to be sould almost in eury street, called Coffee, and another kind of drink called Tee, and also a drink called Chacolate, which was a very harty drink.” The first coffee house was set up in St. Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill, in 1652; two or three years later a second was established close by, in St. Michael’s Churchyard. A third, the Rainbow, located in Fleet Street by the gate of the Inner Temple, was prosecuted in 1657 for being “a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighbourhood”; the principal complaint was of “evil smells” as well as the danger of fire. Yet the popularity of coffee houses among Londoners immediately became apparent, both from “the convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of town,” as Macaulay said, and the further convenience “of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge.” By the turn of the century, there were some two thousand of them in the capital.

An anonymous painting of one, dated approximately 1700, shows several bewigged gentlemen sitting down to “dishes” of coffee; there are candles upon the tables, while the floor is of bare wood. One customer is smoking a long clay pipe, others are reading periodicals. One such periodical, the Spectator, opened its first number in the spring of 1711 with an account of the world of coffee houses: “sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s, and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man overhear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday Nights at St. James’s CoffeeHouse, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner Room, as one who comes there to hear and to improve. My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree …” In all these coffee houses the news and rumours of the day were disseminated.

There were coffee houses for every trade and every profession, and Macaulay noted that “Foreigners remarked that the coffeehouse was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that the coffeehouse was the Londoner’s home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow.” The famous doctor, John Radcliffe, travelled from Bow Street to Garraway’s Coffee House, in Change Alley, Cornhill, where at a particular table he was always “to be found, surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries.” He timed his visits “at the hour when the Exchange was full,” no doubt in the hope of also being attended by rich merchants and brokers.

In other coffee houses, lawyers met clients and brokers met each other, merchants drank coffee with customers and politicians drank tea with journalists. The Virginia and Maryland Coffee House in Threadneedle Street became a recognised meeting-place for those engaged in business with Russia, and so changed its name to the Baltic. The Jerusalem in Cornhill was the haven of West Indies trade, while Batson’s in Cornhill was a kind of “consulting room” for doctors waiting to receive their clients in the City. Old Slaughter’s Coffee House, in St. Martin’s Lane, became the recognised centre for London artists. St. James’s of St. James’s Street was for Whigs, while down the road the Cocoa-Tree at the corner of Pall Mall was the haunt of Tories and Jacobites. The Grecian in Devereux Court catered for lawyers; Will’s on the north side of Russell Street, Covent Garden, was a haven for wits and authors. There was even a floating coffee house, a boat moored off the stairs of Somerset House, which was called the Folley. It was as “bulky as a man-of-war” and was divided into several rooms serving coffee, tea and “spiritous liquours.” Like many London establishments on the river it began with fashionable company but, by degrees, attracted drunken or disreputable customers until it seems to have become little more than a floating brothel. At length it decayed, and was sold for firewood. Not being on land, it had no tenacity of purpose.