‘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.

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.

Church plants from the coffee house

In fact, in one case at least, that of James Jones of Southwark, a coffeehouse was used as a headquarters for church-planting.