A coffee crawl is a pub crawl you can do before lunch and still be useful afterwards. London is unusually good for it: the specialty scene is dense, the independents are close together, and in the City of London you are walking over the ground where coffee houses were invented in this country.

How many stops, and how much coffee

Three to five stops over two to three hours is the sweet spot. More than that and your palate is gone and so are your hands.

The trick is not to order the same thing everywhere. A rough pattern that works:

  • Stop one: an espresso, so you get a clean read on the house blend before anything else muddies it.
  • Stop two: a filter or pour-over of a single origin. Ask what they have on and what it is meant to taste like, then see whether you agree.
  • Stop three: whatever the shop is actually known for — a flat white, a cold brew, an AeroPress, a batch brew.
  • Stop four: something with milk and something to eat, because by now you need both.

Drink water between stops. It sounds fussy and it is the single thing that makes the difference.

Two routes that work

The City of London

Best on a weekday, because the Square Mile is a ghost town at the weekend and most of the good independents close with the offices. The payoff is history: England’s first coffee house opened in St Michael’s Alley off Cornhill in 1652, and the institutions that grew out of the coffee houses are still here — Lloyd’s of London started life in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, and what became the Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan’s. You are not drinking near that history, you are drinking on top of it. There is more in how coffee helped build London.

Along the way you get Leadenhall Market’s Victorian glass roof, St Dunstan in the East, and a handful of cafes built into church crypts.

Westminster

Better at the weekend, and better if you also want the landmarks. The cafes here are less obvious because most visitors never leave the main roads, which means the good ones survive on regulars rather than tourists. See the best coffee near Westminster for the sort of thing to look for.

How to spot a good shop from outside

  • A named roaster on the bag, and a roast date on it.
  • Staff who answer "what have you got on filter?" without checking.
  • A short menu. Long menus mean the kitchen matters more than the coffee.
  • Grinders, plural. One for espresso, one for filter.

Our barista’s guide to finding great coffee in London goes further into this.

Or let someone else do the planning

We run two guided versions, both led by a former cafe owner and barista, both two and a half hours, both £59: the City of London Coffee Crawl on weekday mornings at 10 AM, and the Westminster Coffee Crawl Monday to Saturday at 11 AM. You can see both on our coffee tours in London page.