Coffee Crazy

It’s hard to walk more than a few metres without passing a coffee shop. Linda Dearsley traces the history of our love affair with the brewed bean.

- Linda Dearsley

Maybe it all started with Frasier. The 1990s US sitcom about the Crane brothers, Frasier and Niles, both psychiatrists from Seattle – chalk and cheese in character yet equally unlucky in love.

Every week they met in their local coffee shop, Café Nervosa, to bicker wittily over steaming cups of the strangest beverages – white chocolate mocha, cinnamon dolce latte, caramel macchiato. This was coffee?

Here in the UK, we’d never seen anything like it. Talk about exotic! But then along came Costa Coffee, Caffè Nero and Starbucks, and suddenly there were coffee shops everywhere, with armchairs and fancy brews and whole menus devoted just to coffee. It seemed we caught on fast and very soon we were sauntering over to the counter to order our skinny lattes and Americanos.

These days, our love affair with coffee continues unabated. Today, there are around 22,000 coffee shops in the UK – a number that has doubled in the last 10 years and is still accelerating. From Land’s End to John O’Groats, in disused banks and converted warehouses – no town is too small, no building too unpromising to accommodate a brand-new coffee shop.

Coffee shops taking over from pubs