Although Britain today is known as a tea-drinking nation, it was one
of the earliest Western countries completely to submerge itself in
the pleasures of coffee. Again, the street peddlers were first - or
possibly street peddler, as there is a record of only one, a Greek
who worked the streets of Oxford in the late 1630s. The first
English coffee house may have been in Oxford in 1650, but there are
more definite indications that it was opened in 1652, in St
Michael's. Cornhill, near today's Treadneedle Street, by the
Armenian Pasqua da Rosee. Certainly by the time Samuel Pepys was
writing his diary, London coffee houses abounded, and by 1700 they
were numbered in the hundreds if not thousands. The shipping deals
discussed over tall enamel pots in Edward Lloyd's coffee led to the
establishment of the world's most famous insurance market:
Jonathan's coffee house in Change Alley become the London stock
exchange, and those hundreds of other "penny universities", of which
names can be put to many, were not only the source of well-know
literary associations but introduced Englishmen to the novelties of
newspapers and tipping.
