The Coffee House Rules

I read an article recently which gave me a bit of a shock.

Back in the day, and I’ll be more specific on ‘the day’ in a moment, only men could visit a coffee house for their caffeine fix. Yep, you heard it from me, it was not the done thing for a woman to enter the premises of a café, and order their trim mocha latte, Americano, macchiato, take away or to have in. Can you imagine such a place? I shudder to think how I would have survived – but I have to, because my contemporary protagonist may well fall into a time slip, and find herself wandering the streets of London on a miserably wet Thursday morning, in 1652, and not have the ability to gather her thoughts and dry her jeans at the corner Costa café, like it’s 2005.

Common Ground cafe Browns Bay — Common Ground Eatery – Browns Bay

And now, as I start off the month of November in 2018 sitting in our local café, soaking up the welcoming babble of coffee being made, mums and babes chirping, retirees having a laugh, mobiles ringing, I’m trying to envisage the world of the coffee house of 300 years ago. A few minutes of online research from various sources (a great article here by the Telegraph, and here’s one by Driftaway Coffee) tells me that an entry fee was charged to keep the riffraff out. Smoking was almost compulsory – can you imagine the pipe smoke fog – but gambling and shouting frowned upon. Merchants and businessmen, stockbrokers and writers, intellectual thinkers, all met with their colleagues and associates and debated their opinions or discussed deals. But the sole female in any of these houses would have been the dame de comptoir. The only female. And women did protest (read more here) about being kept out, by suggesting the evil drink of coffee was doing quite some damage to their husbands. There is some debate on whether this petition was actually written by women, or was purely satire of the day.

With that love hate relationship I have with NaNoWriMo (a global challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November – 1,700 words per day), you can rest assured I can be found at least a few times this month at a local coffee shop, enjoying the liquid gold elixir of coffee, getting that word count up, and ever grateful that I am not banned just because I’m a girl. Unlike my poor protagonist, who won’t be allowed in and will have to settle for the nearest rowdy tavern … unless a hero comes to her rescue …

Helen Cann, a talented UK artist, has created a fictional map of 17th century London coffee houses – click here to view her wonderful artwork.

Happy reading and writing everyone, and best of luck to fellow NaNo’s this month!