East, North, West, and now South. Our intrepid efforts to map London’s modern coffee scene continues apace with this, our latest in the ongoing Sprudge Guide to London’s roaring coffee scene.

This guide is best read in concert with the Sprudge Guide to North London, not for some lazy comparison about compass points, but because โ€œsouthโ€ is in many ways as inadequate an encapsulation of โ€œnorthโ€ for areas that stretch and unfurl horizontally as much as they do vertically. To understand how these coffee shops share commonalities but do so in radically different contexts, it would be best to walk from one to another, or visit two localsโ€”Brownโ€™s and Good as Gold, or Nola and Old Spikeโ€”on one cafe crawl.

Parts of London on this guide, especially Elephant and Castle, Brixton, and Peckham, have also been more violently and forcibly changed by developers and landlordsโ€™ desire to tastemake for affluent property buyers. One inescapable downside of the growth of specialty coffee is what its sometimes homogenous aesthetic can flatten and erase; in turn, this guide seeks to celebrate cafes that refuse this process.

 

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Nostos

Founded by Edison Shehu in May 2021, Nostosโ€”the name derived from the Greek word for โ€œhomeโ€โ€”mixes traditional elements of Hellenic coffee culture into contemporary London specialty, all in the shadow of beautiful Battersea Park. So order an espresso or cappuccino freddo, the latter capped with sticky, dense froth like snow on a mountain top, or pick up a carefully brewed filter from the likes of playful Amsterdam roaster Dak. Or, do both, and fully capture the two moods of Nostos.

black cowboy coffee

Black Cowboy Coffee

John Otagburuaguโ€™s cafe homage to Black American cowboys may now have a sizable space inside the newly built Elephant Arcade, but the way he got there is not as smooth as the rich, old-school espresso he pulls day in, day out. Having long traded at Elephant and Castle Shopping Centreโ€”a hub for Black and Latinx communities in south Londonโ€”he and many other traders were pushed out by developers who have demolished the building for new-build flats. Otagburuagu was eventually granted this new space after a long period of uncertainty, and his majestic peanut butter cappuccinos and other luxuriant milkshakes still flow, but it should not have demanded such resistance for it to be possible.

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Good as Gold

Anthony Khouri and Tom Hibbertโ€™s Brockley cafe started life as a residency in probably the most famous barbershop cafe in the world: Sharps, which launched a thousand (well not quite) shops from its Soho incubator. Itโ€™s now a firmly established fixture in Southeast London, frequently brewing fragrant filters from near-neighbors Plot alongside a tight and reliable menu of espresso drinks. An evening dinner series has only burnished its reputation further, with the same care and attention paid to food and wine as the caffeinated stuff this guide aims to provide.

Good as Gold is located at 209 Mantle Rd, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebookย and Instagram.

15 grams

15 Grams

Itโ€™s a dosing joke! Oh my god!! Okay but seriously: Normally the trajectory for a serious London neighborhood shop goes like this. They open, they buy nice coffee from a nice roaster, they brew nice coffee from a roaster nicely, and nice people come and think โ€œwow, this coffee is nice.โ€ Then the cafe thinks, “Ooh what if we made nice coffee from nice coffee we roasted nicely ourselves instead,” they try to start roasting, and then the nice coffee they roast is roasted not very nicely and it is sad. 15 Grams in Greenwich decided this nice idea wasnโ€™t very nice at all, so instead they honed their roasting first, in partnership with a Marylebone newsagent and a couple of cafes, then opened the cafe to brew their nicely roasted coffee nicely. Now itโ€™s one of the best cafes in Southeast London, and indeed the whole city, whether for espresso or filter. Nice.

15 Grams is located at 28 Greenwich Church St, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Instagram.

Browns of Brockley

We now arrive at the institution section of this list, and it begins with Ross Brownโ€™s eponymous Browns of Brockley. It has evolved into myriad formsโ€”a coffee van at the home of cricket, Lordโ€™s, a diminutive spin-off called Bon, in nearby East Dulwich, and a takeover of Forest Hill favorite St Davidโ€™sโ€”but the Brockley cafe is mothers both ship and lode. A Square Mile lifer on espresso with a penchant for guests on filter, itโ€™s a model of consistency and excellence that any neighborhood cafe in any part of London would aspire to matchโ€”or just get somewhat close.

Browns of Brockley is located at 5-6 Coulgate St, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

park st borough arch 2

Monmouth Borough

Before the Square Miles and the Workshops, the Mothers Milks (RIP) and the Prufrocks, there was Monmouth. It may have began on the street for which it is named in Covent Garden (and a small shop stands there still today) but it is its larger space which pours out on to Stoney Street in Borough Market that has become its most famous cafe. Its roasting style may not be as light as some of the cooler kids might want, but joining the queue for a remarkable production line of cone-filtered coffee, selected from a roster of beans available to buy by weight, is one of the London coffee experiences to this day.

Monmouth Borough is located at 2 Park St, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Instagram.

Balance Coffee

One of the longest established coffee shops in Brixton, owner Aliโ€™s business has come on leaps and bounds since he founded the cafe with his partner in 2014. Focused on espresso drinksโ€”and a technicolor range of juices and smoothies โ€” it isnโ€™t just its longevity that makes it such an important hub for the area. Ali has since established Perception, a coffee roastery of his own, broadening the menuโ€™s palate and adding something new to Balanceโ€™s offering, which will in turn become a legacy for himself and for Brixton over time.

Balance Coffee is located at 179 Ferndale Rd, London. Visit their official website and follow them onย  Twitterย and Instagram.

 

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Old Spike

One of the first London speciality cafes and roasters to use the beverage as an outlet for social enterpriseโ€”by offering training and support to homeless people designed to lead to employment with longevityโ€”Old Spike has held court in Peckham since 2015. Founded by Cemel Ezel and Richard Robinson with support from Rob Dunne, its Peckham Rye cafe/bean-browning space still holds up seven years later, with a willing focus on the art of blending for fruit, as well as chocolate that will recall, for U.S. heads, the likes of Intelligentsiaโ€™s Fruit Bat and Summer Solstice.

Old Spike is located at 54 Peckham Rye, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
watchhouse
Photo by Darren Rowlands

Watchhouse Maltby Street

The best of what is now 12 cafes (backed by a combination of crowdsourced investmentย andย institutional investment) Watchhouseโ€™s Maltby Street arch doesnโ€™t just house its newish roasting operation, but also one of the most beautiful brew bars in the capital. The classifying of origins into โ€œrituals,โ€ โ€œventures,โ€ โ€œhorizons,โ€ and โ€œraritiesโ€ according to how far they stray from โ€œwhat coffee tastes likeโ€ is, in all honesty, a little bit cringe, but the filters hereโ€”whether on batch, or done by-the-cup on branded pour-over conesโ€”are always high quality.

Watchhouse Maltby Street is located at 36 Maltby St, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Nola

Please donโ€™t stop reading when I tell you that a popular indie band founded a coffee shop in London, because it is actually genuinely very good, man. Anthony West and Josephine Vander Gucht of Oh Wonder havenโ€™t just opened a really good cafe; they promoted their last album with nothing less than a sponsored coffee tasting tour, which is probably the first and last time that sentence will ever be written unless they do it again. Nola, the fruits of their passion, serves coffee roasted by Belfastโ€™s Bailies, out of a very slick Mavam machine. Itโ€™s lo-fi but warm, cool but with heartโ€”very much like their music.

Nola is located at 224 Rye Ln, London. Visit their official website and follow them on Instagram.

James Hansen (@jameskhansen) is a London-based journalist and an associate editor at Eater London.ย Read more James Hansen for Sprudge.ย 

Correction: An earlier version of this article depicted Watchhouse as being backed by private equity investment. They are in fact backed by combination of crowdsourced investmentย and institutional investment.ย 

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