 Though English travellers to the Middle East had earlier commented on the drinking of coffee there, coffee did not appear in England until 1637, when the diarist John Evelyn mentions it being drunk in Oxford when Balliol College entertained the Patriarch of Constantinople. Oxford was the site of the first English coffee house, opened in 1650 by a Lebanese proprietor.
 The first coffee house in the capital opened in 1652 in St Michael’s Alley in Cornhill. It was followed by many others, famously patronised by businessmen, politicians and men of letters such as Dr. Samuel Johnson. Stockbrokers gravitated to Garraway’s in Change Alley, estate agents to the Ludgate and insurance brokers and shipping agents to Edward Lloyd’s in Lombard Street. Lloyd used to post on his walls the latest news of the movement of ships around the world. Eventually his establishment outgrew his informal coffee house surroundings and the agents and brokers moved into a purpose-built exchange.
 Coffee houses flourished in England during the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Although women sometimes ran coffee houses or worked as cashiers, their clientele was exclusively male. In fact women in London generally resented their men retreating into these smoky, inaccessible dens. The King and his government were also suspicious of the plots that might be hatched in these places. Charles II tried to close the coffee houses down, but the demand for them was too great, and in their heyday there were some two thousand of them in London alone.
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