A purist's guide to London coffee: we narrow it down for you

London has more specialty coffee shops than any city in Europe, and more ways to get it wrong. The chains fill every station concourse, and plenty of independent cafés buy their beans from the same two or three wholesalers. The places in this guide are different: most roast their own coffee, the rest name their roaster on the menu, and all of them publish enough about their sourcing that you can follow a cup back to a farm.

We have organised them by neighbourhood, from Covent Garden and the City out to Hackney and Bermondsey. The list is not ranked.

Monmouth Coffee Company, Covent Garden and Borough

Monmouth started roasting and retailing coffee in 1978 in the basement of its Covent Garden shop, and the shop is still there. The roasting has moved twice, first to railway arches in Bermondsey in 2007 and then to five converted arches at Spa Terminus, where two Loring roasters now run. The second shop is by Borough Market, and a third is in Bermondsey.

The approach has not changed in nearly fifty years: coffee from single farms, estates and cooperatives, sold whole-bean and ground, with every coffee available to taste in the shops. Monmouth no longer uses paper cups, so takeaway means your own cup or one of its reusables, and its filter coffee is brewed with 22 grams of freshly ground coffee. Pastries come from Little Bread Pedlar, Notting Hill Bakery, Babelle and Chocolarder. Card payments only.

Prufrock Coffee, Clerkenwell

Prufrock has served coffee and food in Clerkenwell since 2011 and is as much a training centre as a café. The house roaster is Square Mile, with guest coffees from Five Elephant, Koppi, Coffee Collective, Tim Wendelboe, La Cabra, Drop Coffee and Belleville rotating across the espresso and filter menu. Food is made from scratch, and the training room runs SCA-accredited courses for professionals and home brewers.

Kaffeine, Fitzrovia

Kaffeine opened in Fitzrovia in 2009 as an independently owned café and espresso bar inspired by the coffee culture of Australia and New Zealand, and its website still calls it a benchmark-setting café of the London scene. A larger second shop a few streets away followed in March 2015. The kitchen posts a weekly-changing menu, from espresso pancakes to focaccia, with pastries from Seven Seeded Bakery, and the fortnightly coffee classes have run since 2010.

Workshop Coffee, Belgravia

Workshop has roasted since 2011 and now lists one café: Workshop Cafe and Academy, under green awnings on a red-brick corner in Belgravia, near Victoria. The room is designed for quick visits and longer stays, serving seasonal single origins, the house espresso Article, and filter brewed to order, with seasonal food from breakfast through lunch and an evening aperitivo of wine and cocktails. Beneath the café, the Academy runs masterclasses, monthly origin cuppings and SCA courses.

Ozone Coffee, Shoreditch and London Fields

Ozone’s Shoreditch eatery combines specialty coffee with a kitchen that serves breakfast and lunch seven days a week, walk-ins only at weekends. London Fields is the smaller, more relaxed room, with rotating single origins on filter and house blends on espresso. Weekday espresso bars sit at St Paul’s and Aldgate. The coffee is roasted every working day at Ozone’s roastery in Stafford, and the company is a certified B Corp that publishes an annual impact report.

Origin Coffee, Shoreditch, Southwark and the British Library

Tom Sobey founded Origin in Cornwall in 2004, and it remains one of the longest-standing specialty roasters in the country, with UK Barista Championship wins in 2016 and 2018. Its London flagship in Shoreditch hosts the full range of monthly feature coffees around a brew bar. The Southwark café sits beneath the railway arches and adds espresso soft serve; a third café inside the British Library leans into education. Origin roasts lightly, and its coffee also fills the cups at Rosslyn below.

Climpson & Sons, Hackney

Climpson & Sons began as a stall on Broadway Market in 2002 and still has its café on the market, with a Saturday cart on the market itself. Roasting happens in Leyton, and the headquarters and academy in Hackney run workshops such as a home espresso course. The roastery supplies cafés, restaurants, hotels and offices across the country, and in 2026 the company opened a second café in Deal, Kent.

Rosslyn Coffee, the City

Mat Russell and James Hennebry established Rosslyn in 2018 as a collection of high-volume specialty coffee shops in the City of London, and the formula has grown to ten locations, from the original near Mansion House to London Wall, Tower 42, the Royal Exchange, Leadenhall Market and the station shops at Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street. Rosslyn does not roast: Origin supplies the coffee, The Estate Dairy the milk and Mörk the hot chocolate. Its stated philosophy is “we are nice to people and we make great coffee”, and it came second for best independent coffee shop in Europe in 2019.

WatchHouse, Bermondsey

WatchHouse took its name from its first café, opened in 2014 in a former 19th-century watch house in Bermondsey, a tiny building the company calls its Tardis, with ten seats and sandwiches, and dogs welcome. It roasts at a Bermondsey roastery opened in 2020, and now runs some 25 Houses across London, split into Brunch Houses and Espresso Houses, plus Bath, New York and Dubai.

Formative Coffee, Victoria

Formative opened in March 2019 in a modern space hidden between Westminster and Victoria, designed to put coffee centre stage and cut down on distractions. It is a roastery and café built around competition: founder Ian has won multiple national championships, placed sixth at the World Barista Championship in 2024 and took the Irish Barista Championship in 2025. The coffee ranges are called Benchmark, Exceptional, Competition and Future.

Redemption Roasters, Bloomsbury and across London

Redemption was born in October 2016 with a mission to reduce reoffending through coffee. The roastery started inside HMYOI Aylesbury and moved to HMP The Mount in 2020; the company trains prison leavers as roasters and baristas, and at the end of 2023 reported a 4% reoffending rate among its employed participants against a national average of 42%. The first shop opened in July 2017 in Bloomsbury, with 23 seats upstairs and 35 downstairs, and ten more have followed, from Covent Garden and Holborn to King’s Cross, Dulwich Village and Hampstead Heath.

Compane, Camden Passage

Compane runs four small espresso bars. Three are in the West End: Princes Arcade in Piccadilly, Quadrant Arcade off Regent Street and a room by Berkeley Square in Mayfair. The fourth has the most charming setting. It sits in the middle of Camden Passage, the narrow pedestrian lane of antique shops and market stalls off Upper Street, a few minutes from Angel station, with the Sirplus menswear shop next door. The St James’s estate, Compane’s landlord in Piccadilly, describes it as a coffee house run by Sirplus; Compane’s own site does not say so. Compane calls its rooms “a peaceful oasis within the city’s hustle and bustle”, built for a quick espresso or a midday treat, and counts local businesspeople, retail workers and tourists among its regulars.

The espresso is Allpress, pulled as a double shot as standard, with almond, Bonsoy and oat milk alongside dairy. Tea is loose-leaf from Good & Proper, and the pastries are baked locally and delivered each morning. Compane is also the rare London café that posts its full drinks list with prices online.

Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters, ten locations

Victor and Santiago Gamboa and Adnan Millwala started Hermanos as a pop-up in Walthamstow in 2018, roasting only Colombian coffee at their London roastery. There are now ten locations, including one by the Columbia Road flower market, a railway arch in Walworth, a kiosk at King’s Cross St Pancras and shops in Notting Hill and Barnes. In 2026 the company won Best Coffee Shop Operator for ten to fifty locations at the London Coffee Festival Awards.

What you need to know about London specialty coffee

Which London coffee shops roast their own beans? Monmouth, Workshop, Climpson & Sons, WatchHouse, Formative, Redemption and Hermanos roast in or around London. Ozone roasts in Stafford and Origin in Cornwall. Prufrock serves Square Mile and guests; Rosslyn serves Origin; Compane serves Allpress; Kaffeine does not name its roaster.

Where can you settle in with a laptop? Workshop designed its Belgravia café for longer stays, and Redemption’s Bloomsbury shop has two floors of seating. Monmouth’s shops are built for standing, tasting and buying beans rather than laptops.

How expensive is a coffee in London? Most of these shops publish food menus but not drink prices, so check the board. Compane is the exception and lists every drink with its price on its website. Beans are the better value: every roaster above sells bags in the shop and online.

Where should a first coffee walk start? Shoreditch has Ozone and Origin a few streets apart. Bermondsey has WatchHouse, Monmouth’s third shop and the Spa Terminus roastery. Fitzrovia and Clerkenwell pair Kaffeine and Prufrock for a central crawl, Angel has Compane on Camden Passage and a Redemption shop in Islington, and Hackney has Broadway Market on a Saturday.