Media and communication

News Over Coffee

When the first coffee houses opened in London in the second half of the seventeenth century, they quickly became something more than places to drink a bitter and unfamiliar beverage. For the price of a single dish of coffee, a customer could sit for hours reading the newsletters and printed sheets that proprietors left on the tables, or listen as the latest reports were read aloud and argued over. Merchants, clergymen and clerks who could never have afforded subscriptions of their own thus found it possible to keep [1] of events at home and abroad. Particular houses came to be associated with particular kinds of intelligence – shipping, say, or politics – and a regular who wanted to know what was happening in a given field knew exactly where to go. Not everyone approved. The authorities, uneasy at the thought of so much unsupervised talk, at one point tried to close the houses down altogether, with conspicuously little success.