Transcript

The lost world of the London coffeehouse | Dr Matthew Green | TEDxEastEnd

[Music] okay thank you very much uh I just want to ask you a question to begin with how many of you guys have been into a coffee shop in the last week could you put up you don't have to stand up but you put up your hand so that's an awful lot and uh I want to ask you another question um can you you just summon up a mental picture of that coffee shop and uh answer me this could you imagine walking in sitting down next to a stranger and asking for the latest news then debating it for hours on end that's a no okay another question um could you imagine Marching In whipping out a book of poetry slamming it down next to someone's Vanilla Ice latte demanding to know their opinion before delivering your own PR of the book in a big boom boing voice to the whole shop that's a no okay um what I want to reveal to you tonight or this afternoon even is that 300 years ago the Streets of London were lined with a very different breed of coffee house where such Behavior was actively encouraged um they wouldn't think you were a menace or a nuisance or a freak if you just went up to a stranger and started talking this used to happen day in day out in coffee houses all over the city and one individual in particular uh his name was Dudley Ryder this guy behind me he was a coffee junkie and he was local as well uh he lived in uh Hackney in Bohemia place and uh back then Hackney was a very different place to what it is now as you might imagine it was a bucolic Paradise it was like an Arcadia Beyond morefields it was surrounded by all these Meadows and Fields and Market Gardens and this is the junction that he used to use to get into London this is the junction of Cambridge Heath Road and may streets um a bit different isn't it and you can just about make out the Dome of St Paul's in the background and um he dropped in to the Hackney coffee house this was about 301 years ago and he recorded in his secret diary he saw a room full of people he didn't know any of them but he sat down asked them what the latest news was and he heard alarming report the jackaby Rebellion that was swirling in Scotland was moving ever closer to England and it was going to come down and take over London and he debated it for hours on end and then he left feeling Ed ified and refreshed and for Dudley Ryder that's what his family home has become by the way a busot um for Dudley ryer like for so many people coffee houses were emancipatory spaces they freed people from the strictures and straight jackets of society they allowed people to interact with who they wanted how they wanted where they wanted and in a way that they wanted without abiding by any kind of class concerns or um any Notions that certain subjects were taboo and every time Dudley rid took a sip of coffee uh every time any of us take a sip of coffee we're participating in a ritual that stretches back 361 years to this Alleyway anyone know it this is right in the thick of the city of London this is St Michael's alley in Corn Hill for it was here in this churchard in the year 1652 that this man here uh who was an eccentric Greek entrepreneur called Pascal Ros he opened London's first coffee Shack I say Shack because it didn't have any of the things we associate with houses like tables or chairs or a roof or anything like that and he opens it uh against those black railings which were then a stone wo to the churchard garden now I don't know if you guys are coffee connoisseurs I from the amount of people that put their hands up I'm guessing quite a lot of you are but if you're into your silky smooth flat whites brw to mathematical Precision in one of the the finest third wave coffee houses in Hackney the taste of the 17th century stuff would have you headed for the nearest toilet bowl um this was routinely described even back then so it's not just a case that our taste buds have become more refined people at the time thought it was disgusting as well it was routinely compared to oil ink soot mud and most commonly just um nonetheless This Bitter muhammadan gr as it came to be known it would transform the face of the city bring people together and Inspire brilliant ideas pasare claimed that it was a miracle cure for just about every single ailment he could think of uh and people loved the way that it stimulated the body and the mind and sparked conversations but the main reason for its success uh and this might come as something of a surprise but until the arrival of coffee most people in the country were either slightly or very drunk all day long not because we were a nation of Alcoholics but because you couldn't drink the river water unless you had a death wish because it was notoriously polluted so the arrival of this GRL would trigger a dawn of sobriety that would lay the foundations for spectacular cultural and economic and science scientific growth in the decades that follow purely because people were thinking clearly for the first time in their history so this was the jet fuel you might laugh but it's true this was the jet fuel of the Enlightenment this uh this kind of hellish concoction as it was known um and you can still find the plaque in the alleyway today and he triggered a coffee house boom um by the turn of the 18th century there were 3,000 coffee houses all over the city and much unlike all those kind of blands cafos and Starbucks and those kind of depressing places that have invaded our high streets today the great thing about the original coffee houses was that every single one was different so I'm just going to take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the more outlandish establishments if you went to Chelsea you could go to Don sto's coffee house which was a museum of monsters you had snakes and crocodiles nailed to the wall and Isaac Newton would be sitting in the corner sipping his coffee musing over the monsters if you went a bit further west you could go to the Grecian coffee house which was a cold of scientific debate so much so that a natural philosopher turned up one day with a dolphin draped over his back and he proceeded to slam it down whip out a knife and dissect it to prove his theories on Dolphin dissection um so imagine trying that in a caffero today um here's what it has become let's not forget the Latin coffee house this was opened by hogarth's father not one of his better commercial propositions because it had one rule one rule only you had to speak in Latin all day long or you were thrown out that lasted about weeks and it operated from This Magnificent uh prior that's still there in Clark andwell today um elsewhere there was a floating Coffee House a glorified dance floor for rakes and dandies and even when the The Ice froze which it did because they had a little ice age in the 17th 18th century they used to set up coffee houses on the ice um which you can see there but what about round here because there were coffee houses in Hackney as well the most famous was perhaps the hawton square Coffee House and Hackney then was renowned for its lunatic asylums it was full of mad houses public and private so what better activity to do in the Haxton Square coffee house than what they called inquisitions of insanity whereby it's very Politically Incorrect but a suspected mad man or woman would be tied up thrown into the coffee house everyone got to go and prod the alleged lunatic and then they retire to the table sink a shot of the disgusting coffee and vote are they actually mad or not and if it was unanimously declared that you were mad you were dragged away to a mad house for the rest of your life and these events were highly popular and of course we still have mildly pretentious idiosyncratic uh coffee houses today this is of course the serial killer uh I just put that in for a joke really um okay so in spite of this diversity um there was a of Common Thread um it's easy to recreate what it was like to actually go inside any of these coffee houses um so the first thing you'd notice would be that you'd be engulfed in a whirlwind of smoke and sweat and steam and eventually the haze would clear and you'd see a scene much like the one on the screen behind me long wooden tables long wooden benches smartly dressed men and there would be drinking thinking writing piping debating um you know like uh persecuting the coffee house cat Etc one thing you wouldn't see would be any women inside um the only woman you can see in this picture of course is the woman in the bar and unfortunately coffee houses liked to portray themselves as sanctuaries of rational thought and level-headed debate and in the misogynist mindset of the day women were simply incapable of that so they weren't allowed in if a woman was seen in a coffee house and she wasn't pouring out the GRL it was automatically assumed that she was a prostitute so these were male only zones and and that was one of their shortcomings so the haze is cleared everybody will put down their their coffee put down their newspaper put down their pipe and they would Point At You and they'd all scream out the following words your servant sir what news from Tripoli okay sometimes it was abbreviated simply to what news have you and if you were in the Latin coffee house it would have been quid Novi now although technically it cost one p to get in and you could stay there and drink and think and debate for as long as you like the real currency was news and gossip and you weren't allowed to sit down until you divulged a nugget of Gossip this might be something you'd read in a paper it might be something that you'd made up um and it normally actually was something that You' made up because these places were Wellsprings of misinformation and lies as much as they were incredible sources of information much like the internet today uh you'd get to the front you'd see a cidlik boy pouring the coffee from as high a height as he could that was called pouring it alamod uh and um you wouldn't so much start your own conversation you'd melt into one that was already in full flow that's why I began with that perhaps slightly factious seeming question that's what this gentleman in the black is doing on the right he's melting into a conversation that is already um in full flow so why was it like that why is it so different the experience of going into coffeee houses today there was a fortuitous Collision of factors the most important of which was a media Boom at the start of the 18th century and that was dovetailed with the growth of cities and the rise of the idea of politeness which meant that people should try and interact with as many people as they could so they would chisel away their rough antisocial edges and become shiny polished and poite and we're still living with the consequences of that today uh Dudley Ryder he was a man who was 23y old guy he was go he was awkward he was ruthlessly ambitious though he was um dissatisfied with his own personality and in the spirit of the Enlightenment he saw personality as something that could be molded and manipulated and he used to kind of adopt Gees to present a favorable impression of himself in these public coffee houses that were so convivial and uh ultimately he kind of succeeded in knitting together a super personality based of all the people he had observed in the coffee houses which he foisted on top of his own unsatis satisfactory personality which he kept hidden in the diary and he went on to become famous and he actually rose up to become the Lord chief justice one of his favorite coffee houses and perhaps my favorite too if I could go back in time would have been buttons in Covent Garden now this was just a Stones Throw from the Piaza itself it was opened by this man here Joseph Addison the great poet and playwright mainly because he didn't like his wife that much so he wanted a kind of retreat from a tempestuous marriage but he being who he was it soon evolved into an Emporium of wit and all the great writers of the age Addison steel Pope gay Swift Etc they all assembled there and costed their superb literary judgments upon the work of aspiring writers making and breaking litery reputations in the process so if you got a thumbs up from those guys it was like getting a retweet from Steven Fry on Twitter today people would rush out and buy the book and watching it all from a hook in the corner was this it's a lion crossed with a wizard I've never been able to see the wizard part myself but it is and the public were invited to feed it with letters and lims and stories the very best of which would be roared out in a special weekly edition of the original Guardian newspaper so this really was uh a medium for interaction and Society Beyond borders and um there's actually still a coffee house that operates from the site of buttons today um so here we have the sort of literary convivial buttons do you want to see what it is today yes you were Whispering it you KN you dived it you knew it's a Starbucks there there's not even a blue plaque um one of London's many lost coffeee houses and for me this is a big big shame because the kind of mode of interaction in a Starbucks is utterly different in Starbucks people sit sequestered from the world immersed in their own thoughts tapping out little babblings on Twitter or Facebook either that or they just stare out of the window miserably into the sort of drizzly Street Beyond there's no Fizz there's no buzz there's no conviviality if you talk to a stranger they think you're absolutely clinically insane um and you're not going to be staring into the sparkling eyes of a customer inquiring after the latest news um you're going to be staring into the dull electronic glare of a smartphone or a laptop and for me the kind of interaction that you get in places like Starbucks is more reminiscent of what we see in something like this this is Night Hawks by Edward Hopper it's an image of Urban Oni and anonymity that's so affecting that it really sort Sears itself into your mind and that for me is what Starbucks is like and you can see here a typically miserable scene in a Starbucks uh this is not uh well what why does this matter um I I I think basically as we slide into an increasingly virtual world and you it's going to come a point where the barriers between the virtual world and the real world are going to dissolve all together um in a very real way not in a sort of futuristic dystopian way but um and I think in light of these developments we can't remind ourselves enough the importance of face-to-face interaction in an increasingly virtual world think of trolling you know I'm sure you will read I know the comments at the bottom of the guardian or the end of dep dependent or the whatever you read you very rarely have a levelheaded exchange of ideas it's kind of vitory like character assassination one upmanship and um if you're in a coffee house where you've actually got a real physical person in front of you then you know it's not going to break out into an argument that was a spectacularly ill time slide because there's a picture here of a man throwing a cup of coffee in someone else's face uh just to show I'm not fetishizing these coffee houses um but they remind us that we can lose touch with this face-to-face plane which I think is very important finally there are a few Grounds for Hope well quite a lot of Grounds for Hope um over the last 8 10 years there been a Renaissance of small independent coffee shops all over London a lot of them in Hackney here are some of my favorites there topa on deoa a bit like the floating coffee house that one because you can sit on the floating seats you got the Hackney Pearl and Hackney Wick the proud archist in haggon uh Violet these are just my locals really Violet cakes Wilton way and they have managed to elevate the art of making a cup of coffee into this kind of epicurian art form you know these flat whites they are to die for we've come on a long way since the days when coffee tasted like and uh in all these places if it's brewed even sort of slightly too hot or too cold all these gadgets start beeping and it has to be remade so that's good but we still don't really have a space where you can go in sit down maybe at a themed table philosophy table politics table conspiracy table and just talk to strangers a bit like what we're hopefully going to do today so having just listened to all of that with your help I'd like us to make it a revolution in the true sense that is a turn of the wheel back to the housan days of the 17th and 18th century coffee houses so next time you go into a coffee house I don't want you just to sit on your own and check your email or read the news I want you to scan the room for someone you've never seen before it can be someone you like the look of okay then you walk over to their table you sit down you slide your chair ever so close you lean in you put your hand on their shoulder and then you scream those four Immortal words what news have you and if enough of us do it then we will spread the revolution thank you very [Applause] much