From a kneeling slave at the Royal Exchange to the coffee house that was at the heart of the trade, a new tour is revealing a side of London that is often glossed over
Tucked down a narrow alleyway in the City of London, hidden in the medieval muddle of courts and backstreets, stands an ornate terracotta-fronted pub. Beneath a moulded frieze and a ye olde Dickensian lantern, a plaque declares that this was the site of London’s first coffee house, opened in 1652. The Jamaica Coffee House was founded by Pasqua Rosée, the Armenian servant of a coffee merchant, and frequented by the likes of Samuel Pepys. What the plaque fails to mention is that this little establishment was also at the very centre of the transatlantic slave trade.
“A huge amount of the City of London’s wealth came from slavery, but the connection is mostly invisible today,” says tour guide Ildiko Bita. To redress this situation, Bita and her group, Six in the City, have put together a revealing walk, titled Slavery and the City. Part of this weekend’s Open House festival, the walk unpicks the intimate connections between the City’s Lord Mayors, priests, financiers and the highly profitable atrocities of the slave trade. “Most walking tours tend to gloss over anything a bit difficult and end with funny anecdotes,” says Bita. “But this one is different. We’re going to look the uncomfortable aspects of the past squarely in the eye.”
The quaint backstreet pub, site of the former Jamaica Coffee House, is one of the many eye-opening stops on the route. Where usually a guide might regale you with stories of the birth of London’s coffee culture, or charming details about the facade, Bita paints a graphic picture of a place where sugar plantation owners would meet with slave ship captains to broker deals over the fate of hundreds of enslaved Africans, thousands of miles away.
