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I am quite curious about the old London coffee house culture. Why don't we have it today? Could we recreate it? Do we have it today in another form? Have they b

I am quite curious about the old London coffee house culture. Why don't we have it today? Could we recreate it? Do we have it today in another form? Have they been mythologised? Is it an example of the September effect? It's talked about as being a place where relative strangers socialised and had substantive conversations on politics and philosophy that changed the history of ideas whereas today they are places to be "alone together". My best guess is that clientele were so filtered by opportunity/access such that they resembled a business cafeteria or a private members club more than a public venue. I guess the closest thing today might be a subject specific meetup. I suppose that if trying to recreate one, you might want to base it around the service of a novel stimulant that can't be found elsewhere that encourages frenzied socialisation. MDMA cafe anyone?

darawk 6y ago
> I am quite curious about the old London coffee house culture. Why don't we have it today? Could we recreate it? Do we have it today in another form? Have they been mythologised? Is it an example of the September effect? I think arguably we're posting on a modern one right now.
- duncanawoods 6y ago
  Heh, yeah, but it's so non-social I think it might be an equivalent to their letters page of The Times.
- chansiky 6y ago
  Yes, but have people met here and spun off a new company from their conversations? There's something significant missing from comment based interactions that exist in IRL interactions.
  - Kluny 6y ago
    Since it's HN, I would think probably, yes :) I personally have received a job interview on the strength of a comment I posted here.
atoav 6y ago
As an Austrian I don't think it has been mythologised. It just doesn't fit with the accelerationist philosophy of many places anymore. When I studied in Vienna (a city famous for it's coffee house culture), you could just go there, drink one coffee and stay for 4 hours, meet people, chat, discuss etc. When you go to a καφενεíο in Greece things are pretty much the same still (only that you drink a Nescafé Frappé instead of their warm counterparts). In my eyes the metropoles of the anglosphere are too transactional, too monetized and to much under (economic) pressure to allow for such inefficiency. In London I'd probably feel guilty for staying much longer in a café than my drink lasts (or someone would tell me to leave). If you have places that don't have such policies, they at least signal this with their interieur and their throughput. Most starbucks are certainly not cosy places that I'd like to spend my day in given the choice between a starbucks and a traditional viennese coffee house.
- batmenace 6y ago
  That's very interesting. (Pre-Corona) I used to spend a lot of days working in coffee shops all around the city. Never at all felt any time pressure, whether in a small independent shop or a Starbucks/Costa type place. That's helped of course by the better shops making good food, too.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    Which city are you in? I suspect the time pressure might be of a different magnitude in a city with a denser population, where the rent per sq ft might also be significantly higher.
- lonesword 6y ago
  I've been to the "anti cafe" in Rome, and the idea is that you pay for the time you spend there instead of for what you consume. It was 4 euros per hour, capped at 16 euros per day, and (potentially unlimited) snacks and coffee are included. I believe they have branches in Paris and Strasbourg[1] [1] https://www.anticafe.eu/en/ https://www.anticafe.eu/en/
  - 6y ago
lordnacho 6y ago
Times were different back then. You could print stuff, but only so many people could read. So even if someone wrote something in a pamphlet, you wanted to find your buddy who could read to explain it to you, with the added benefit of lively discussion. It was also an interesting time in the world where a lot of new thought was appearing. Nowadays, there's some subtantial differences. Intellectual authority changed. You can't have a credible intellectual discussion about anything without having heard of a certain set of old guys anymore. Their intellectual heirs sit at universities and tell everyone where the thinking went since those days. This is both good and bad. If you want a serious discussion, you need to have done some homework, and you won't find a bunch of people who understand your interest area in a pub. You might find them on various online forums, a relatively recent thing.
- iguy 6y ago
  London hit 90% literacy around 1750, and that's including the guys who shovelled horse-shit for a living, I'm pretty sure patrons of Lloyd's were very close to 100% literate from the start. But how much people had read, and how easily they could find new things, were of course vastly different. They were still busy inventing newspapers, and wikipedia was some way off.
  - lordnacho 6y ago
    TIL > London hit 90% literacy around 1750 Still though, if you look at today, there's plenty of people who can read, but don't. You'll find lots of modern people who don't know anything about what happened in history, what the political themes are, and so on.
  - lordnacho 6y ago
    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/spread-of-literacy-in-nineteenthcentury-england/8F696710081BF83DC7E1136CC79647E3 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
    - iguy 6y ago
pantalaimon 6y ago
> I suppose that if trying to recreate one, you might want to base it around the service of a novel stimulant that can't be found elsewhere that encourages frenzied socialisation. MDMA cafe anyone? aren't those just called techno clubs?
markdown 6y ago
> I suppose that if trying to recreate one, you might want to base it around the service of a novel stimulant that can't be found elsewhere that encourages frenzied socialisation. You're looking for kava.
m-p-3 6y ago
> September effect Never heard that one, do you mind elaborating?
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  Probably https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
As a remote worker, a single programmer or an author, you can still work in a coffee house. But only because you don't have to communicate with other patrons. People who do business hang out with their colleagues in offices. In a certain way, offices are the coffee houses of today. Ships are too expensive nowadays for a single person to own or manage them. So companies own them and all the specialists who would meet in a coffee house meet in meeting rooms and conference calls. To bring coffee houses back, you need some information with the need to be exchanged very locally. I doubt that it is possible after the introduction of the internet, at least for trading information.
- iguy 6y ago
  I think part of it is that corporations hadn't really been invented yet. So for any venture too expensive for one person, you needed to gather backers... and they had to gather somewhere. Maybe we should think of this as the slime mold stage of capitalism, before real permanent multi-cellular entities got going.
thinkingemote 6y ago
Pubs in London replaced it basically. The local.
jayflux 6y ago
> Do we have it today in another form? Pubs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47858013 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47858013
pjc50 6y ago
I definitely experienced something like it at Cambridge, but only among university people, and that was before smartphones and social media. There _used_ to be a popular working class intellectual movement, miners building libraries for themselves and so on. It seems to have ended at the TV age.
PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
Kind if banal, but it just seems like internet forums and twitter now.
varispeed 6y ago
What do you mean? There is plenty of places where you can get a coffee and hangout or even pull your laptop and do some work. I am not talking Starbucks, but family coffee shops. They have books, board games, cards and WiFi. Often also a selection of home made sandwiches and cakes.
Animats 6y ago
Lloyds, in its insurance period, was really a co-working space. That approach to insurance required multiple people to assume part of the risk. Each insurer would sign their name on a contract, below other names. This is where the term "underwriting" comes from. They had to get together somewhere to do this. It's probably not authentic, but you can see the Hollywood version of Lloyds Coffee House in "Lloyds of London" (1936)[1], around 25:30. [1] https://archive.org/details/1936LloydsOfLondon https://archive.org/details/1936LloydsOfLondon
ValentineC 6y ago
> It's talked about as being a place where relative strangers socialised and had substantive conversations on politics and philosophy that changed the history of ideas whereas today they are places to be "alone together". These days, I think that sort of environment exists in some of the "third places": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

darawk 6y ago

> I am quite curious about the old London coffee house culture. Why don't we have it today? Could we recreate it? Do we have it today in another form? Have they been mythologised? Is it an example of the September effect? I think arguably we're posting on a modern one right now.

duncanawoods 6y ago
Heh, yeah, but it's so non-social I think it might be an equivalent to their letters page of The Times.
chansiky 6y ago
Yes, but have people met here and spun off a new company from their conversations? There's something significant missing from comment based interactions that exist in IRL interactions.
- Kluny 6y ago
  Since it's HN, I would think probably, yes :) I personally have received a job interview on the strength of a comment I posted here.

atoav 6y ago

As an Austrian I don't think it has been mythologised. It just doesn't fit with the accelerationist philosophy of many places anymore. When I studied in Vienna (a city famous for it's coffee house culture), you could just go there, drink one coffee and stay for 4 hours, meet people, chat, discuss etc. When you go to a καφενεíο in Greece things are pretty much the same still (only that you drink a Nescafé Frappé instead of their warm counterparts). In my eyes the metropoles of the anglosphere are too transactional, too monetized and to much under (economic) pressure to allow for such inefficiency. In London I'd probably feel guilty for staying much longer in a café than my drink lasts (or someone would tell me to leave). If you have places that don't have such policies, they at least signal this with their interieur and their throughput. Most starbucks are certainly not cosy places that I'd like to spend my day in given the choice between a starbucks and a traditional viennese coffee house.

batmenace 6y ago
That's very interesting. (Pre-Corona) I used to spend a lot of days working in coffee shops all around the city. Never at all felt any time pressure, whether in a small independent shop or a Starbucks/Costa type place. That's helped of course by the better shops making good food, too.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  Which city are you in? I suspect the time pressure might be of a different magnitude in a city with a denser population, where the rent per sq ft might also be significantly higher.
lonesword 6y ago
I've been to the "anti cafe" in Rome, and the idea is that you pay for the time you spend there instead of for what you consume. It was 4 euros per hour, capped at 16 euros per day, and (potentially unlimited) snacks and coffee are included. I believe they have branches in Paris and Strasbourg[1] [1] https://www.anticafe.eu/en/ https://www.anticafe.eu/en/
- 6y ago

lordnacho 6y ago

Times were different back then. You could print stuff, but only so many people could read. So even if someone wrote something in a pamphlet, you wanted to find your buddy who could read to explain it to you, with the added benefit of lively discussion. It was also an interesting time in the world where a lot of new thought was appearing. Nowadays, there's some subtantial differences. Intellectual authority changed. You can't have a credible intellectual discussion about anything without having heard of a certain set of old guys anymore. Their intellectual heirs sit at universities and tell everyone where the thinking went since those days. This is both good and bad. If you want a serious discussion, you need to have done some homework, and you won't find a bunch of people who understand your interest area in a pub. You might find them on various online forums, a relatively recent thing.

iguy 6y ago
London hit 90% literacy around 1750, and that's including the guys who shovelled horse-shit for a living, I'm pretty sure patrons of Lloyd's were very close to 100% literate from the start. But how much people had read, and how easily they could find new things, were of course vastly different. They were still busy inventing newspapers, and wikipedia was some way off.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  TIL > London hit 90% literacy around 1750 Still though, if you look at today, there's plenty of people who can read, but don't. You'll find lots of modern people who don't know anything about what happened in history, what the political themes are, and so on.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/spread-of-literacy-in-nineteenthcentury-england/8F696710081BF83DC7E1136CC79647E3 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
  - iguy 6y ago

pantalaimon 6y ago

> I suppose that if trying to recreate one, you might want to base it around the service of a novel stimulant that can't be found elsewhere that encourages frenzied socialisation. MDMA cafe anyone? aren't those just called techno clubs?

markdown 6y ago

> I suppose that if trying to recreate one, you might want to base it around the service of a novel stimulant that can't be found elsewhere that encourages frenzied socialisation. You're looking for kava.

m-p-3 6y ago

> September effect Never heard that one, do you mind elaborating?

reducesuffering 6y ago
Probably https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago

As a remote worker, a single programmer or an author, you can still work in a coffee house. But only because you don't have to communicate with other patrons. People who do business hang out with their colleagues in offices. In a certain way, offices are the coffee houses of today. Ships are too expensive nowadays for a single person to own or manage them. So companies own them and all the specialists who would meet in a coffee house meet in meeting rooms and conference calls. To bring coffee houses back, you need some information with the need to be exchanged very locally. I doubt that it is possible after the introduction of the internet, at least for trading information.

iguy 6y ago
I think part of it is that corporations hadn't really been invented yet. So for any venture too expensive for one person, you needed to gather backers... and they had to gather somewhere. Maybe we should think of this as the slime mold stage of capitalism, before real permanent multi-cellular entities got going.

thinkingemote 6y ago

Pubs in London replaced it basically. The local.

jayflux 6y ago

> Do we have it today in another form? Pubs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47858013 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47858013

pjc50 6y ago

I definitely experienced something like it at Cambridge, but only among university people, and that was before smartphones and social media. There _used_ to be a popular working class intellectual movement, miners building libraries for themselves and so on. It seems to have ended at the TV age.

PrinceKropotkin 6y ago

Kind if banal, but it just seems like internet forums and twitter now.

varispeed 6y ago

What do you mean? There is plenty of places where you can get a coffee and hangout or even pull your laptop and do some work. I am not talking Starbucks, but family coffee shops. They have books, board games, cards and WiFi. Often also a selection of home made sandwiches and cakes.

Animats 6y ago

Lloyds, in its insurance period, was really a co-working space. That approach to insurance required multiple people to assume part of the risk. Each insurer would sign their name on a contract, below other names. This is where the term "underwriting" comes from. They had to get together somewhere to do this. It's probably not authentic, but you can see the Hollywood version of Lloyds Coffee House in "Lloyds of London" (1936)[1], around 25:30. [1] https://archive.org/details/1936LloydsOfLondon https://archive.org/details/1936LloydsOfLondon

ValentineC 6y ago

> It's talked about as being a place where relative strangers socialised and had substantive conversations on politics and philosophy that changed the history of ideas whereas today they are places to be "alone together". These days, I think that sort of environment exists in some of the "third places": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place