14 New Specialty Coffee Shops To Visit in London

The past two years have been among the most challenging for hospitality businesses, including specialty coffee shops, in London, and around the world. Keeping a specialty coffee shop in business in London is difficult even in normal times, let alone during a global pandemic, which has felt like a game of snakes and ladders with constant changes of rules, snap lockdowns and general uncertainty. Unfortunately, some coffee shops have had to close permanently (please come back, Black Swan Yard!), but it's been encouraging to see how many new — and often exciting — cafes have opened in London in the past couple of years. 

The Birmingham Caffeine Chronicles: Quarter Horse Coffee

UPDATE: Sadly, as of August 2023, Quarter Horse's Bristol Street location has closed permanently. But you can still visit their espresso bar and roastery in the Jewellery Quarter.

My specialty-coffee-shop-hopping continues to turn up surprise connections and today's post is about my return visit to Quarter Horse Coffee on Bristol Street. The connection is that, as you may have seen if you follow me on Instagram, I stopped by Peloton Espresso the weekend before — which itself occupies the former site of Quarter Horse's now-defunct Oxford cafe, which I visited many times.

The Birmingham Caffeine Chronicles: Faculty

While back in the West Midlands earlier this month, I was able to visit a second speciality coffee shop in Birmingham before catching my train home. And like Tilt, Faculty is based in a historic arcade close to New Street station.

The Birmingham Caffeine Chronicles: Tilt

En route to Molineux Stadium to watch Wolves play a friendly against Spanish team Celta de Vigo last weekend, I broke my journey in Birmingham. I had to leave home very early during a torrential downpour and was in dire need of more coffee by the time I got to Moor Street station. Luckily, I knew exactly where to go: Tilt, a speciality coffee shop, craft beer bar and pinballeria in Birmingham's historic City Arcade, which my fellow coffee blogger Brian recently wrote about again on the Coffee Spot.

The Caffeine Chronicles: WatchHouse, St Mary Axe

The expansion of WatchHouse Coffee is such that at this point, there's a veritable Watch Village — or, at least, at Watch Hamlet — in and around Bermondsey. I visited their newest location in 70 St Mary Axe last week, and it was highly impressive: both in terms of the cafe build-out and the coffee itself.

A Staycation Weekend in Notting Hill and Mayfair

With the glorious British summer in full force — oh, wait, that was two weeks ago — it was the perfect time for a staycation. I joined my parents in Pall Mall for a couple of nights last weekend, and although it wasn't as sunny as we had hoped, nor was it as rainy as forecast, and we made the best of it, dining at three different restaurants and spending a very enjoyable day exploring Notting Hill.