Prêt à Manger ou à Ètudier?

A Brief History of Studying in Coffee Shops

I was sipping my cappuccino in Pret the other day and wondered to myself: why is everyone working? It didn’t help that I was working too, but almost every table had a book, laptop, or pile of notes with some happy recipient reading, typing, or writing away. It launched me into an inquiry as to why humans are drawn to hot-beverage shops as sites of study. It turns out the history is a lot richer than one might imagine, and certainly a lot richer than the lukewarm coffee I was begrudgingly gulping down.

It all started in fifteenth-century Yemen when Sufi orders involved in long prayer sessions drank coffee to stop them from nodding off. This coffee, which Yemen produced and exported all over the world, was named after the city of Mokha. Sound familiar? The first ‘coffeehouses’ sprang up in Damascus and spread across the Ottoman Empire. These houses weren’t just places where people drank coffee and conversed, but also where they played chess, listened to music, and even discussed politics — so-called “schools of wisdom.”

Europe took a bit longer to adopt these coffeehouses but, notably, the Viennese coffeehouse tradition started to spread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and financiers met and discussed what was in the local and foreign newspapers, made available to all customers. In England, the entry fee was only one penny, which included a cup of coffee, earning these places the name “penny universities.” People shared theories, plans, and projects together, and this form of intellectual discussion spread across Europe through the Enlightenment period.

The absence of alcohol in such places created more serious conversations than in alehouses, but many still gossiped about daily scandals. In today’s ‘coffeehouses’ — that we call ‘coffee shops’ — I think the discussion of scandal and gossip might be more commonplace than politics and natural sciences. But the lack of alcohol remains, unless you’re counting The Red Gown as a coffeehouse. In which case, Voltaire would be rolling in his grave.

This still doesn’t answer the question of why we — or indeed the great Enlightenment thinkers — are drawn to coffee shops as sites of study. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg used the term “third places” to describe unifying locations that allow for socialising outside one’s home and designated workplace. Amongst these are gyms, libraries, leisure centres, and parks. Coffee shops also act as a middle ground between the strict silence of a library, for example, and the distracting comfort of home.

There is also something to be said for social accountability, in that being surrounded by strangers forces you to focus on your work in order to avoid the quiet scrutiny of others. Especially in a place like St Andrews, where ‘performativism’ doesn’t go amiss, the desire to get your head stuck in a book or scurrilously catch up on lecture notes doesn’t just come from personal betterment.

The other obvious reason that we can work so intentionally in coffee shops is that caffeine increases our brain’s function and gives us that much needed ‘kick’ to get the work done. Moreover, a 2012 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that our productivity increases when a certain level of background noise is present. This ambient noise, at around seventy decibels, is generated from the clinking of cups or general chatter and, whether we realise it or not, is part of the reason we return to coffee shops.

With that, I shall close my inquiry and conclude that there is a lot more than just coffee that draws us to study at those Market Street chain coffee shops. For me, however, it’s the pastries.

Illustration by Bethany Morton