pic: florinN
National Coffee Week is upon us, and to celebrate being a nation of coffee lovers ELL headed out to the coffee haunts our readers voted the best in the borough. Your winners were (drum roll please): Café 1001 in Tower Hamlets, the Deptford Project in Lewisham, Matthews Yard in Croydon and Haggerston Tearoom in Hackney.
South and East London has an abundance of excellent places to kick back and relax in. Your four winning venues not only served fantastic coffee and locally sourced food, but also had their own unique take on design, atmosphere and vibe. From the Deptford Project’s iconic location in an old rail carriage to Café 1001’s unconventional use of an old warehouse space, the cafes we visited were certainly unusual. Each independent coffee shop was both creative and community focused – whether they were established after the 2011 riots or purely for the purpose of bringing people together.
If that was not enough reason to set up a coffee business, research is now showing that coffee has become a recession proof industry. Independent businesses have opened and experienced growth during the recession where others have struggled, or even shut down. Our penchant for coffee has been a cultural and business phenomenon of the last decade. The rise in quality independent coffee shops came alongside the introduction of more coffee chains in the UK since the late 1990s; the two types now have a combined turn over of £5bn a year. In 2011, 35 new independent coffee shops opened in the capital and many have been able to open new branches since. And, business advisors predicted the market would grow by 25% between 2009 and 2014, according to Marketing Week.
Good coffee, it seems, might be an affordable luxury that we do not want give up, and sipping it in relaxed café’s while catching up with friends or working is now more appealing than ever.
Derek Lamberton recognised the trend almost two years ago, prompting him to create London’s Best Coffee app. Lamberton said: “I first released London’s Best Coffee in late 2010 as the specialty coffee movement in London was gaining speed. Like many Londoners, I was instantly drawn to both the taste of the coffee and the culture found in these particular independent coffee shops.”
“Places like Dunne Frankowski and Prufrock at Present, both near Shoreditch High Street station, are neither cafe nor simply pop ups, but more homes to the local community of coffee connoisseurs. What interesting is the new wave of extremely good neighbourhood cafes. Both Brown’s of Brockley (Brockley Station) and 46B Espresso Hut (Homerton station) are representative of the thirst for seriously high quality independent cafes that are embedded in their local communities.”
Other contenders in our boroughs were the London Particular in New Cross, Love in Cup in Tower Hamlets, Allpress in Hackney and Coffee Time in Croydon, among many more personal favourites. It’s a shame we could only visit four..
