THE LOCAL COFFEE SHOP Coffee shops along with the rest of the High Street have suffered in the pandemic. Jeremy Knight, Curator, Horsham Museum & Art Gallery, takes a look at coffee drinking and Horsham’s first known café.
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ne of the great discussions of the economic impact of the pandemic has been that of its effect on coffee shops. Coffee shops that have bustled and boomed in London and other cities, and at railway stations serving millions of customers their early morning fix. Alongside those discussions went the realisation that some local coffee shops and cafés were thriving as stay at home workers went out and shopped locally rather near their normal place of work. Such conflicting stories will continue throughout the pandemic and beyond, so today Horsham Museum is looking at the early days of coffee drinking and the town’s first known café. The 17th century saw the rise of two great drinks, Coffee and Chocolate, though not known about as much, there were chocolate shops serving hot chocolate. It was coffee that caught the imagination, partly because of its role in developing the news trade and stock markets, becoming a meeting house for people, who worked from home, but wanted a place to discuss – a similarity that is 250 years old. Coffee houses were a relatively new concept in drinking; a space that was not an ale house, did not make you drunk and that was a male preserve. Introduced into London in 1652 at the height of the puritanical Commonwealth which attacked licentious behaviour, the hot bitter black drink from Turkey proved a hit, spreading quickly through urban merchant areas. As with anything new, it is through the copying of others that people learn. In this case, the coffee shop in Horsham would have mimicked the coffee shops in London and other towns and cities where merchants and men circulated. The drinking of
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1792 Map showing The Star location.
coffee, the coffee house and the creation of a male space were creating a brand and a culture that was unique. The experience was such that it led to satires being written about the culture, satires which help explore how the space functioned and how people responded to it, both men and women. As a caveat, it is impossible with the documentary material we have available to know for certain if Horsham viewed the coffee shop in the same cultural way as London, but London was not alien to Horsham, Horsham was not parochial. Before we explore the culture of the coffee shop, the matter of sex needs to be explored. Originally, in the 16th century and earlier, the coffee houses of Istanbul employed young attractive boys to serve clients coffee and sexual
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