London, told in roaster-cafés.
18 specialty roaster-cafés that roast their own beans and have a café you can visit. Plan a one-day crawl, listen to the guide, or print the map.
★ London is a coffee capital remade twice over — by a 1978 Covent Garden roastery and by the 2007–2012 wave of World Champions and Antipodean migrants who rebuilt how Britain orders its morning coffee. Fresh Cup Magazine
How this list is built: every stop is a roaster in the PremiumRoast directory with public opening hours or a confirmed café, and a brand with several locations appears once. 1 of 18 stops have a written PremiumRoast review so far; the rest are directory listings. Last reviewed May 2026.
All 18 stops on the map
Open full crawl in Google Maps →The London coffee scene
The modern scene traces two founding moments decades apart. Monmouth Coffee, opened on Monmouth Street in 1978, roasted single-origin in the shop basement long before the term existed. The real acceleration came in 2007, when James Hoffmann won the World Barista Championship using coffee roasted by Anette Moldvaer (who simultaneously won the World Cupping Championship); the pair co-founded Square Mile in 2008, introducing the Scandinavian-inflected medium-light roast that displaced darker blends citywide. That same year Gwilym Davies opened Prufrock and Melbourne-born Peter Dore-Smith opened Kaffeine.
Geography carved the scene into neighborhoods. Shoreditch and the East London belt — Hackney, Dalston, Broadway Market — became the densest cluster, anchored by Prufrock on Leather Lane, Allpress on Redchurch Street, and Dark Arts Coffee, founded in 2014 in a Homerton railway arch with a cult following. Bermondsey tells a parallel story: its Victorian arches once stored imported coffee — 'London's larder' — and today Monmouth's roastery and WatchHouse operate along the same corridor that hosts the Saturday Bermondsey beer mile.
Peckham rounds out the southeast: Old Spike Roastery roasts and brews from a single site with an explicit mission of training and employing people experiencing homelessness. Across all neighborhoods, the 2008–2012 culture was unusually collaborative — Square Mile's open monthly public cuppings are credited by multiple founders as the connective tissue that built London's barista community.
A bit of history
Monmouth Coffee Company, founded in 1978 at 27 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, roasted on a 1930s Whitmee machine in the basement and pioneered single-origin sourcing in the UK — making it London's oldest continuously operating specialty roaster by more than two decades.
Sources: freshcup.com·en.wikipedia.org·shop.squaremilecoffee.com
Listen — the London coffee guide
A short spoken walk-through of the crawl, narrated from our profiles.
Suggested route
Start at Rosslyn → Origin Coffee (Charlotte Road) → Urban Baristas → Nonna Anna → MakeMake Coffee Kiosk 1…
Open in Google Maps →The crawl
18 roaster-cafés · 1 reviewed by PremiumRoast · no chains.
- 01Rosslyn
Est. 2018
Rosslyn (also styled Rosslyn Coffee) is a specialty-coffee roaster based in the City of London, United Kingdom, that opened in 2018 and has grown from a single site into a collection of high-volume cafés in the Square Mile. Its retail coffee is organized by brew method into three lines — 'Roasted for milk', 'Roasted for black', and 'Roasted for filter' — and it sells a co-branded 'Daily Scoop' Financial Times Special Edition coffee. Rosslyn has been recognized by the Financial Times, Drift Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller, and Eater.com, and placed 2nd for Best Independent Coffee Shop in Europe at the 2019 Allegra Coffee Awards.
Our takeRosslyn's critical reception has been unusually concentrated for a roaster less than a decade old. Condé Nast Traveller named it 'the best coffee shop in the City of London'; Drift Magazine listed it among 'one of the best new cafés in the world.' The Financial Times coined the phrase 'best worst kept secret' of the neighborhood — an observation prominent enough that Rosslyn put it on its own homepage. Eater.com offered the sharpest framing: that Rosslyn 'might represent a template for the next phase in the evolution of specialty coffee in London.' The Allegra Coffee Awards backed that framing with hardware, ranking it second for Best Independent Coffee Shop in Europe in 2019 — one year after it opened. The cafés are located within the City of London, meaning the experience skews weekday and professional. For those not near a shop, Rosslyn sells whole-bean coffee direct-to-consumer via its Shopify storefront, with free shipping on orders over £15. Gift subscriptions are available — a practical nod to the corporate-gifting demographic the City naturally supports. A ceramic mug range rounds out the retail offering.
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- 10Gibson's
Best time to visit
Weekend mornings at Borough Market's Monmouth reliably produce a queue — arrive before 9 a.m. Reusable-cup discounts are standard at independents; tipping is uncommon for counter service, though rounding up is conventional.
What to order
The flat white — a short, strong espresso with microfoamed milk at a higher coffee ratio than a latte — is the default London order, a direct legacy of the Australian and New Zealand migrants who opened the city's foundational cafés. Several top bars (Kaffeine among them) are espresso-only; filter has grown as a secondary offering since the mid-2010s.
Frequently asked about London coffee
- How many specialty roaster-cafés are there in London?
- PremiumRoast lists 18 specialty roaster-cafés in London — roasters that roast their own beans and have a café you can visit. 1 of them has a written PremiumRoast review so far.
- Which London coffee roasters have been around the longest?
- The longest-established specialty roasters in London include Rosslyn. Rosslyn (founded 2018) is among the most historic on the scene.
- What are the newest specialty coffee roasters in London?
- Among the newer entries shaping the London specialty coffee scene: Algerian Coffee Stores, Amar Café Chelsea, Coffee 091.
- Is there a printable coffee day-trip guide or map for London?
- Yes — PremiumRoast offers a free 2-page printable PDF guide, an audio walk-through, and an overview map for the London coffee crawl. Download at premiumroast.coffee/coffee-trip/london-united-kingdom.