Déja Brew
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The Jamaica Wine House today
The Jamaica Wine House, previously Jamaica Coffee House, was established in 1652. The picture below shows a blue plaque stating that it was the first coffee house in London. However, the plaque fails to mention its role as an informal meeting place for a plethora of city goers, from slave traders to abolitionists who would discuss and negotiate slave ships, insurance, the buying and the selling of commodities and the destiny of slaves.
Plaque outside of the Jamaica Wine House today
Every kind of mercantile was dealt with at the coffee house, with the main focus being on the slave trade. The significance of this building can be witnessed in advertisements about slaves in pamphlets and posters. For example, a notice published in the newspaper Post Man and the Historical Account in February 1719 reads:
“Run away from his Master, James Breakfpear, a middle aged man with black hair, his forehead shaved, a frock lined with red and laced with red, a green waist-coat edged with narrow lace…. Whoever meets him is deferred to take him up to the Jamaica Coffee House in Cornhill.”
The Jamaica Coffee House was a social hub for the professional class. As James Walvin describes in Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (1992), ‘London life in the mid-eighteenth century had come to revolve round the city’s coffee houses’. Within the late 17th century, hundreds of others soon opened and coffee was sold in around 3,000 coffee houses in London. The picture below shows a map of the City of London and you can see just how many coffee houses emerged; they all capitalised on sugar and coffee as a commodity that was produced by slaves.
Map showing the location of the Jamaica Coffee House
The Jamaica Coffee House was so popular that traders used the address of the coffee house as their business address. The Jamaica Wine House is an embodiment of the economic, social and political legacies of the slave trade which will forever be entrenched into British society.
Our next stop is the Bank of England, where you will learn about how the informal discussions that took place in the Jamaica Coffee House were materialised and financed, helping to consolidate the slave trade through the use of public deposits, loans and taxes.