Penny Universities: How London's Coffeehouses Changed the World

In 1652, a servant named Pasqua Rosée began selling a hot, bitter drink from a shed beside St Michael’s churchyard in the City of London. Eleven years later the city had 82 coffeehouses, and they had become something new: rooms where a merchant, a scientist and a shopkeeper could share a table, read the news and argue for the price of a dish of coffee. That is the heart of London coffeehouses history, and it explains the nickname that stuck to them: “penny universities.”

Those rooms did far more than serve coffee. Marine insurance grew up in one, share trading in another, and both still carry coffeehouse names in their family trees. Here is how it happened, which stories hold up, and what you can still see today.

Key takeaways

• London’s first coffeehouse opened in 1652 in St Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill, run by Pasqua Rosée with the backing of the Levant Company merchant Daniel Edwards. Oxford may have had one a year or two earlier, but that date is disputed.
• “Penny university” was a nickname: a penny got you in (or bought a dish of coffee), and the newspapers and conversation came with it.
• Two financial giants started over coffee: Edward Lloyd’s coffee house (first mentioned in 1688) led to Lloyd’s of London and Lloyd’s Register, and Jonathan’s in Exchange Alley led to the London Stock Exchange.
• Scientists and writers used coffeehouses as offices: Robert Hooke ran an experiment in one, and The Tatler datelined its reports from Will’s, the Grecian and St James’s.
• Charles II tried to close them all in 1675 and retreated less than two weeks later.

In this article

1. The first coffeehouse in London
2. Why they were called penny universities
3. Lloyd’s: from shipping news to insurance
4. Jonathan’s and the Stock Exchange
5. Scientists, writers and the news
6. The backlash: a petition and a royal ban
7. Why the coffeehouse age faded
8. Timeline
9. What you can still see today
10. Bring the coffeehouse home
11. FAQ

The first coffeehouse in London: Pasqua Rosée, 1652

Rosée is usually described as coming from the Greek community of Ragusa (today’s Dubrovnik), and he worked in the Ottoman port of Smyrna, now İzmir, as the servant of Daniel Edwards, an English merchant of the Levant Company. Part of his job was preparing Edwards’s daily coffee. When Edwards returned to London in late 1651, Rosée came with him, and in 1652 Edwards backed him in opening a public coffeehouse in St Michael’s Alley, a few steps from the Royal Exchange. It started as little more than a shed at the edge of the churchyard.

Rosée promoted the new drink with a printed handbill, The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, often described as the earliest known coffee advertisement in England; a copy is held by the British Museum. It explained that coffee grew in Arabia, was drunk all over the Ottoman world and would keep you awake, so it was best avoided after supper. It also made sweeping medical promises that no advertiser could get away with today.

Trouble soon came from the neighbors. Rosée was not a freeman of the City, so he had no right to trade there, and local tavern keepers complained to the Lord Mayor. The fix, in 1654, was a partner who was a freeman, Christopher Bowman. Rosée disappears from the records after 1658, and Bowman ran a coffeehouse in the alley until his death in 1662. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the original buildings; the Jamaica Wine House now stands on the site, marked by a plaque unveiled in 1952.

Was London really first?

Possibly not in England. The Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood noted that a man named Jacob opened a coffeehouse at the Angel in Oxford, and his later editor dated this to 1650 or 1651. Some historians, including Markman Ellis, doubt that early date. What is certain is that London ran with the idea: James Farr opened the Rainbow on Fleet Street in 1657, and by 1663 the city had 82 coffeehouses.

Why were they called penny universities?

A penny was the customary charge (sources describe it either as the entry fee or as the price of a dish of coffee), and once you had paid it you could stay, read whatever newsletters and pamphlets were lying on the tables, and join any conversation in the room. For people who could not afford to buy every pamphlet, that was a remarkable deal. A broadside poem printed in 1672, The Coffee House, or News-Mongers Hall, made the comparison explicit with the lines “So great a Universitie / I think there ne’re was any,” and joked that a single penny could turn a customer into a scholar.

The idea that rank was left at the door was part of the appeal. A satirical verse broadside of 1674, The Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House, announced that gentry and tradesmen were equally welcome to sit together, then listed mock penalties: swearing cost twelve pence, and whoever started a quarrel had to buy everyone he offended a dish of coffee. Historians stress that no real rulebook governed these places, but the satire captured something true about how mixed the company could be.

One group was largely missing: women customers. Some coffeehouses were run by women, and historians have found exceptions among the customers, but the talk inside was overwhelmingly male, a fact that fed one of the era’s best-known satires.

Lloyd’s coffee house: from shipping news to insurance

Edward Lloyd arrived in London around 1680 and opened a coffee house in Tower Street, near the Tower of London. Its first known mention is a 1688 notice in the London Gazette offering a reward for five stolen watches. His regulars were ship captains, merchants and ship owners, so Lloyd made shipping information his specialty, and in 1691 he moved to bigger premises at 16 Lombard Street, close to the Royal Exchange.

At Lombard Street, people who needed to insure a ship or its cargo could find individuals willing to take on part of the risk. The house also hosted auctions “by the candle,” where bidding closed when a stub of candle guttered out. Lloyd died in 1713, but his name kept working. Lloyd’s List, a shipping newspaper, published its first official edition in 1734. In 1760, customers of the coffeehouse formed a society to share information on shipping, and its first Register of Ships, which graded vessels by their condition, appeared in 1764: the start of today’s Lloyd’s Register. In 1769 professional underwriters broke away to a New Lloyd’s Coffee House, and in 1774 the “Subscribers to Lloyd’s” moved into rooms at the Royal Exchange. The market had outgrown the coffee cup, but it kept the coffeehouse name.

Jonathan’s coffee house and the birth of the Stock Exchange

A short walk away, in the narrow lanes of Exchange Alley (often called Change Alley), Jonathan Miles ran Jonathan’s Coffee House; Robert Hooke’s diary records a visit there in 1677. After share dealers were expelled from the Royal Exchange for rowdy behavior, they did their business in Jonathan’s and nearby Garraway’s instead. In 1698 a broker named John Castaing began issuing a list of stock and commodity prices from Jonathan’s, under the title The Course of the Exchange and Other Things.

By the mid-1700s, Jonathan’s was the center of London’s securities market. It burned down in 1748 and was rebuilt. In 1773 the brokers, by then organized as a club of around 150 members, moved into a building of their own in Sweeting’s Alley, nicknamed “New Jonathan’s” and later renamed the Stock Exchange. A regulated subscription market followed in 1801. Castaing’s modest price list is often treated as the starting point of the London Stock Exchange.

Scientists, writers and the first newsrooms

A laboratory with a coffee counter

Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, kept a diary that reads like a coffeehouse crawl: Jonathan’s, Garraway’s, the Grecian, Man’s, sometimes two in one evening. One entry has Christopher Wren talking about planetary motion over coffee. In January 1680, Hooke used the tall hall at Garraway’s to drop a ball and see whether Earth’s rotation would shift where it landed, then reported the trial to the Royal Society. The Grecian, in Devereux Court, became a favorite of Royal Society members such as Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley and Hans Sloane, who often carried on their discussions there after meetings.

Some coffeehouses offered something close to adult education. From 1698 to 1704 the mathematician John Harris gave a yearly course on mathematics and astronomy at the Marine Coffee House in Birchin Lane, and in January 1714 Richard Steele advertised a course of lectures on mechanics, optics and other sciences at Button’s, with experiments by William Whiston and Francis Hauksbee. That is the “university” in penny university taken quite literally.

Poets, essayists and the news

Writers had their own houses. Will’s, on the corner of Russell Street and Bow Street in Covent Garden, revolved around the poet John Dryden; when Samuel Pepys called in one February evening in 1664, he found Dryden there among the town’s wits. Around 1712, the essayist Joseph Addison set up Daniel Button, a former servant of the Countess of Warwick, in a coffeehouse across the street. Button’s had a marble lion’s head letterbox, thought to have been designed by William Hogarth, where readers posted letters for possible publication in Addison’s paper The Guardian (1713). The lion was later acquired by the Duke of Bedford for Woburn Abbey.

Coffeehouses were also where news was picked up, passed on and argued over. When Richard Steele launched The Tatler on 12 April 1709, writing as “Isaac Bickerstaff,” he sorted its reports by venue: gallantry and entertainment from White’s Chocolate House, poetry from Will’s, learning from the Grecian and news from St James’s Coffee House.

The backlash: a petition and a royal ban

Not everyone loved the coffeehouse. In 1674 a bawdy pamphlet titled The Women’s Petition Against Coffee complained that the drink left husbands feeble and idle, and that men wasted their days in coffeehouse chatter. It was satire, written in mock-heroic style, and it drew a printed reply the same year, The Men’s Answer, defending both coffee and the coffeehouse.

The government had a more serious worry: coffeehouses were where people criticized it. A royal proclamation dated 29 December 1675 ordered them closed from 10 January 1676, blaming them for idleness and for spreading false and scandalous reports about the government. Objections came from all sides, including coffee dealers and members of the king’s own council. On 8 January, an additional proclamation allowed coffee sellers to stay open until 24 June if they posted a £500 bond, took oaths of loyalty and promised to keep scandalous papers and rumors out of their rooms. No further attempt to close them followed.

Why the coffeehouse age faded

London’s coffeehouses never disappeared overnight, but over the eighteenth century they slowly lost their central place. Several things changed at once. Tea grew fashionable: Thomas Twining bought Tom’s Coffee House on the Strand in 1706, and by 1734 his business sold tea almost exclusively. Many houses became more exclusive, closer to private clubs, and strangers were no longer so welcome, which ended the open mixing that had made them special. And the most successful coffeehouse communities simply outgrew their rooms: the stockbrokers moved into their own building in 1773, and Lloyd’s moved to the Royal Exchange a year later.

London coffeehouse timeline

What you can still see today

• St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill: the Jamaica Wine House stands on the site of Rosée’s coffeehouse, with a commemorative plaque from 1952.
• 216 Strand: Twinings still runs a shop at this address, a business that began when Thomas Twining bought Tom’s Coffee House in 1706.
• Devereux Court: the Grecian closed in 1843 and its site became a pub, The Devereux.
• Exchange Alley: the little lane off Cornhill that was home to Jonathan’s still threads through the City.

Bring the penny-university spirit home

The real lesson of the coffeehouse is that coffee tastes better with company and conversation. You can’t buy a dish for a penny any more, but you can brew a pot good enough to keep people at the table. Our House Blend is made for that kind of morning: a medium roast of select Central and South American coffees with nutty, sweet chocolate and mild citrus notes and a clean, bright finish that works as well in a full pot as in a single cup. To set up your own tasting table, start with our best-selling coffees; every bag is roasted 1–5 days before delivery and arrives in 2–5 days. And for the bigger story of how coffee traveled from Ethiopia and Yemen to London in the first place, read our history of coffee.

London coffeehouses FAQ

What was the first coffeehouse in London?

Pasqua Rosée’s coffeehouse in St Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill, which opened in 1652 with the backing of the merchant Daniel Edwards. Oxford may have had a coffeehouse slightly earlier, but that date is debated.

Why were London coffeehouses called penny universities?

Because a penny, the usual charge for entry or a dish of coffee, bought you a seat among newsletters, pamphlets and conversation on every topic. A 1672 poem compared the coffeehouse to a university, and some coffeehouses really did host lecture courses.

Did Lloyd’s of London really start in a coffee house?

Yes. Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, first mentioned in 1688 and based at 16 Lombard Street from 1691, became the meeting place for people insuring ships and cargoes. The market kept the Lloyd’s name when it moved to the Royal Exchange in 1774.

Were women allowed in London coffeehouses?

Customers were overwhelmingly men, and many accounts describe women as excluded. Historians have found exceptions, and some coffeehouses were run by women, but the coffeehouse was largely a male space.

Sources

1. Lloyd’s. Coffee and commerce (Lloyd’s history). lloyds.com
2. Lloyd’s. Historic heroes of Lloyd’s: Edward Lloyd. lloyds.com
3. Lloyd’s Register Foundation Heritage & Education Centre. Our history. lrfoundation.org.uk
4. The London Gazette, issue 1059 (January 1676): An Additional Proclamation concerning Coffee-houses. thegazette.co.uk
5. By the King: A proclamation for the suppression of coffee-houses (1675). Grub Street Project. grubstreetproject.net
6. Stephen Inwood. Coffee Shop Society in 17th-Century London. Gresham College lecture, 2004. gresham.ac.uk
7. London coffee houses and mathematics. MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews. st-andrews.ac.uk
8. The Coffee House, or News-Mongers Hall (1672). English Broadside Ballad Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara. ucsb.edu
9. The Women’s Petition Against Coffee (1674). Wikisource. wikisource.org
10. The Vertue of the Coffee Drink: an ad for London’s first cafe. Open Culture, 2025. openculture.com
11. Pasqua Rosée; Jonathan’s Coffee-House; Button’s Coffee House; Will’s Coffee House; The Tatler (1709 journal). Wikipedia, accessed October 2026. wikipedia.org
12. Twinings. 216 Strand. twinings.co.uk

Facts checked in October 2026.

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