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‘Coffee-man in Southwark’ James Jones

The frequenting of coffee shops by many modern-day students to study, converse and plug into the internet is actually tapping into a much older phenomenon that goes back to the late 17th- and early 18th-century coffeehouses of England.

History Professor Michael Haykin
Figure Image
17th-century coffeehouse

Unlike taverns, coffeehouses came to be recognised, as historian Brian Cowan has noted in his excellent study The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), as serious centres for learning.