The Coffee House: When Did England First Taste Coffee?

Ask when coffee came to England and you get four answers, each defended as the right one. Someone drank coffee in Oxford around 1637, Oxford's first coffeehouse opened around 1650 to 1651, London's in 1652, and a rival Oxford house in 1654.

None of those answers is wrong. They simply describe different events, and the people who recorded them were not always careful. That is my favorite thing about the history of coffee houses in England: the founding story is a pile of rival claims, shop signs and misremembered decades. Untangle it and you see a habit arrive, get taxed, nearly get banned, and then fade slowly. For the wider story, start with A Brief History of the Coffee House. This piece stays in England.

Oxford: a drink and two houses

1637: a drink, not a coffeehouse

The earliest date comes from the diarist John Evelyn. In a passage following his diary entry of May 10, 1637, he describes Nathaniel Conopios, a Greek cleric living at his Oxford college. "He was the first I ever saw drink coffee; which custom came not into England till thirty years after."

Read that slowly. Evelyn says Conopios was the first person he saw drinking coffee, not that it was the first cup in England. It is a private sighting, not a public opening.

Evelyn's arithmetic problem

The second half of the sentence is where Evelyn trips. Thirty years after 1637 lands in the late 1660s, well after England already had coffeehouses. W. H. Ukers, writing in All About Coffee (1922), offered a correction: "Evelyn should have said thirteen years after; for then it was that the first coffee house was opened (1650)." That is Ukers's reading, and it gives us the second date.

1650 or 1651: Jacob at the Angel

England's first coffeehouse was opened in Oxford by a man called Jacob, at the Angel. The Museum of Oxford and Ukers put it in 1650. Patrick Comerford, quoting the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, gives 1651: "Jacob the Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel." No source I have explains the one-year gap, and I won't invent one. "Around 1650 to 1651" is the honest answer.

Even Jacob's name wobbles. Ukers says the founder was called Jacob or Jacobs in some accounts and Jobson in others. Yet the Museum of Oxford and Comerford give a man named Cirques Jobson a different house altogether: the Queen's Lane Coffee House, opened in 1654. According to the Museum, Queen's Lane "claims to be the oldest coffeehouse to continually serve coffee in Europe." Note the verb. That is the house's claim, not a settled fact.

The sign on the door

The Grand Café on the old Angel site bills itself as England's first coffeehouse. Comerford quotes its sign: "The Grand Café, the first Coffee House in England, 1650." History and branding at once, fitting for a commercial idea.

London, 1652: a shop that sold itself

The London date is the least disputed. Ukers writes that "the first coffee house in London had been opened by Pasqua Rosée in 1652," in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill. Rosée was the servant of a London merchant named Edwards, who had picked up the coffee habit while trading in Turkey.

Who Rosée was depends on who is telling it. Markman Ellis, writing in Cabinet, calls him a Greek. Ukers calls him an Armenian or Greek youth. Open Culture, in 2025, calls him a Sicilian immigrant. Pick one and you are taking sides in an argument the sources never settled.

What we do have is his advertising. Open Culture suggests that a handbill held by the British Museum, The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink, could be England's earliest coffee advertisement, and dates it to around 1652. It carries a line any modern café owner would envy: "Made and Sold in St. Michaels Alley in Cornhill, by Pasqua Rosee, at the Signe of his own Head." The bill also sold coffee as medicine: "It is excellent to prevent and cure the Dropsy, Gout, and Scurvy." Coffee entered London as a health product with a logo.

Can you stand where Rosée stood? Comerford places his house on the site of today's Jamaica Wine House. Ian Marshall, writing for the Royal Philatelic Society London, links the Wine House to the Jamaica Coffee House instead. Visit St Michael's Alley, by all means, but treat the plaque-worthy "first" as contested.

The Crown takes its cut

Here is the part I think gets too little attention. Before the English state tried to suppress coffeehouses, it made money from them.

Ukers notes that coffee was "first mentioned in the English Statute books in 1660." That year's Excise Act laid a duty of fourpence on the coffee a maker brewed and sold, charged by volume; tea, chocolate and sherbet paid eightpence. In 1663 another Excise Act required anyone selling coffee, chocolate, sherbet or tea to hold a license, granted at the General Sessions of the Peace. Trading without one cost £5 for every month.

By then the habit had taken hold in the City. Lloyd's of London says that by 1663 there were over 80 coffeehouses within the old Roman walls of the City of London; the MacTutor history site counts 82 in London.

Then came the turn. On December 29, 1675, Charles II issued a proclamation for the suppression of the coffeehouses. It never shut them. A second proclamation, on January 8, 1676, withdrew it. The Gazette's own history says the withdrawal followed an outcry from the public and from coffee, tea and chocolate merchants, and Engines of Our Ingenuity calls the ban unpopular and unenforceable. Ukers adds that sellers were allowed to stay open until June 24, an extension he calls a royal subterfuge, since there was "no further attempt at molestation."

The sequence is plain: tax in 1660, license in 1663, attempted ban in 1675. News circulated and was argued over in coffeehouses, which worried the authorities. In my reading, the Crown wanted the revenue more than it feared the talk, until the talk got loud.

Penny universities and their crowds

English coffeehouses soon sorted themselves by clientele. MacTutor notes that "coffee houses were often called the Penny Universities," a nod to the cheap entry and the conversation. Each house had its tribe. Ukers writes that "It was Dryden who made Will's coffee house the great resort of the wits of his time." In the decade or so after Dryden's death, the wits moved across the street to Button's. The Grecian drew a learned crowd, Fellows of the Royal Society among them. Choosing your coffeehouse was choosing your crowd, much as it is today.

A slow fade, not a sudden death

The usual telling has the coffeehouse vanish in the 1700s. The evidence suggests something slower.

Clubs took the better customers first. Ukers reports that "It is said there were as many clubs at the end of the century as there were coffee houses at the beginning." Shelley, writing in 1909, put it more bluntly: "But the more exalted type of coffee-house has lost its identity in the club."

Yet the coffeehouse did not die on schedule. Ukers places its fall in the 18th century. Marshall, though, shows London coffeehouses still closing in the 1850s, and he quotes the journalist Cyrus Redding, writing in 1858, about the years "since the ruin of coffee-houses by the rage for clubs." The Victorian Web, citing Humphry Ward (1926), reports that John Wilson Croker was complaining in 1823 that clubs had spoiled the coffeehouses and taverns. The honest timeline is a long decline through the 18th century and into the 19th.

You will also read that tea killed the English coffeehouse. I found no source that says so clearly, so I'm leaving it open.

My verdict? Whatever part tea played, the clearest loss was to exclusivity. Once the influential crowd could pay for a private room, the penny-entry public room lost its edge.

Where to go next

England was one chapter. For the rooms before and after England's, read the wider history of the coffeehouse. To trace the beans back further, see where coffee first came from and Mocha, the chief port of early coffee exports. And for more stories like this one, explore the history and culture of coffee.