Lloyd's Coffee House

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

> 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.

> September effect

Never heard that one, do you mind elaborating?

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.

Pubs in London replaced it basically. The local.

> Do we have it today in another form?

Pubs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47858013

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.

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.

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

> 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

One of the entrances has a big stone along the bottom of the door and worn down over the years.

http://www.citypubs.co.uk/pubs/thejamaicawinehouse_pic.html

City of London is amazing because of its mix of old and new, I used to work near the Jamaica Wine House and we would often go there for drinks after work. It's too bad the beer selection there is not great tho.

Recent BBC doc on slavery mentioned the place as the hub for doing deals on humans. So there's that to consider too as you drink in the history.

or as traders call it, the jampot

I once read an interesting theory that coffee was a fundamental part of the renaissance because it gave people something to drink late into the night other than alcohol, provoking huge swathes of sober (and likely somewhat hyperactive) conversation between peers which would previously have devolved into drunken rambling.

Not forgetting the sugar trade supporting the wave of coffee consumption, all based on the major trade not yet mentioned yet in the thread; humans. Britain somehow managed to offshore the distasteful parts of that trade.

The monetisation you mention must specifically include making fraudulent insurance claims on murdered humans and all the rest of it that still gets brushed under the carpet. So great were they at making returns on their capital through popular products and services that the applause drowned out the shameful practices. Doesn't sound wholly unfamiliar at this point in time either!

Lloyd's was very important for trade and shipping, but my understanding is that banking related more to the banci (tables and benches) outside the Ghetto Nuovo in Venice, as well as the Medici in Florence.

Not as weird as thinking of the ecosystem built out of social media. Social media are coffee houses without even coffee.

If you replace Starbucks with pubs and chalk boards with back of a handkerchief then it still exists today

Thanks. I love reading this type of grammar preppie school prose - a communication style designed for elites to recognize another deserving of status. It wasn’t until recently that I learned that most folks didn’t talk this way back then. This style of writing was what Ernest Hemingway “dismantled”. I love both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, btw ... concordantly, of course.

Lloyds tours are sometimes available as part of the Open House thing that happens each year.

Pretty much sums up the narrative. It had to be a non-alcoholic beverage because serious business was being conducted and the fact that it allowed folks to remain awake and energized for the long and boring accounting was even better.

Considering the Victorian who were heavy tea drinkers, no.

Note that London was a hotbed for a lot of revolutionary people, including Karl Marx (who eventually settled down there).