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The past two years have been among the most challenging for hospitality businesses, including speciality coffee shops, in London, and around the world. Keeping a speciality coffee shop in business in London is difficult even in normal times, let alone during a global pandemic, which has felt like a game of snakes and ladders with constant changes of rules, snap lockdowns and general uncertainty. Unfortunately, some coffee shops have had to close permanently (please come back, Black Swan Yard !), but it's been encouraging to see how many new — and often exciting — cafes have opened in London in the past couple of years.  I created an Instagram Guide highlighting some of my favourite 2020 and 2021 openings , but I wanted to collect them together on this blog too. Scroll on down if you're looking for new places to explore and support throughout the city. My usual caveat is that this isn't an exhaustive list, but I have visited most of these coffee shops more than once and enjo...

While working from home during the past year and a bit, I have sought solace in my lunch-break strolls around Bermondsey and Borough, often stopping for food or coffee. Bermondsey has an abundance of specialty coffee shops (I have an updated neighbourhood guide in the works; there's always my south-east London guide in the meantime), and two roasters — Monmouth and Watch House — are based here ( Pact too, although you can't normally visit). One of my regular lunchtime haunts was Black Swan Yard , but upsettingly, it was recently shut down by the landlord with almost no notice. I hope they'll be back but in the meantime, I found myself on Mill Street, down by the Thames, where I happened upon Lantern Coffee . This historic area is a fitting place for a coffee shop given it once housed docks and warehouses for tea, coffee and spices, as reflected in some of the street and building names that evoke the trading heritage, like Java Wharf (just across the mostly subterranean...

Most of my Caffeine Chronicles reviews are about speciality coffee shops I've discovered recently. Not so with Black Swan Yard Coffee , which is one of the closest coffee shops to my home and one that I've visited even more frequently while working from home during lockdown. Somehow, though, writing about the Bermondsey coffee spot has always eluded me, even as it's changed and adapted over the months and years, so I thought it was high time for a post. At present, Black Swan Yard is only accessible via a ground-level hatch in a handsome red-brick building at the top of buzzy Bermondsey Street. There used to be a a seating area inside the adjacent bike shop, but even in the before times, the hatch was the place to be. The photos in this post are from various visits over the past year, and although the A-boards featuring the titular black swan and one of their famous cardamom buns have been there for years, the hatch has gradually become more decorated. Physical distancing m...

Things could be much worse, but I've had a tough few months, with work busier than ever — I work for a scientific journal so it's been non-stop COVID-19 research. And unfortunately, all of the six holidays that I had booked this year happened to fall during times when London and its UK were under more restrictive COVID-19 measures. My last hope of getting a proper break was the two weeks I had booked in November, initially to go to Thailand, then I thought I might manage Italy, before eventually booking  a last-minute trip to Athens, with a family trip to Devon as a back-up. My 'plan C' was to use my annual leave to visit lots of coffee shops and restaurants in London — I really feel for everyone working in the hospitality industry at the moment, and want to continue to show my support. And then, of course, the 'not-a-lockdown' second lockdown  put paid even to that. But coffee shops and eateries are still open for a few more days, so I decided to escalate my pl...

Update (4 Nov 2020): When I visited this restaurant during its soft launch, it retained its original name, The Dairy, but it has since been renamed Bermondsey Larder. I've updated this post accordingly, but some of it photos reflect its original name. Like many people, I was a fan of Robin and Sarah Gill's  The Dairy in Clapham , but I didn't make it over there often enough, which filled me with huge regret when it closed permanently this summer . But to my pleasure, it has now reopened in a new location in Bermondsey . I'd actually been running past its new home, inside the attractive new Bermonds Locke aparthotel on Tower Bridge Road, while it was being created and jumped at the chance to take advantage of its soft launch. If you're entering Bermonds Locke from Tower Bridge Road, you'll need to cross through the Shaman coffee shop  (which also now operates on the ground floor of Treves & Hyde ) and lobby seating area, to get to Bermondsey Larder, which is...