Curated coffee and the loss of community

I’ve lived outside the UK for most of the last fifteen years, and though I visited often, I still get caught out by the quiet ways life at home has changed. Once, cycling through London, a woman who looked about two hundred years old shot past me on her bike. I thought, “Good grief, she’s in incredible shape!” Only later did I realise she was riding an electric bike. London had moved on and didn’t think to tell me.

Another shift that snuck up on me was the way we use our homes. A while ago, someone I knew only lightly—someone I’d met a couple of times and exchanged a few emails with—asked to catch up for some advice. I said I’d be looking after my children, but he was welcome to come round to the house. His reply caught me off guard: “We can always meet another day for a coffee if it’s too weird to come to your house.”I didn’t quite know what to make of that. So, in my usual blunt way, I wrote back: “No, genuinely, please come over. I make great coffee.”When I later told my friends, none of them seemed remotely surprised. Apparently this is normal now. We’ve become a doorstep culture—keeping people on the threshold, not only strangers but even our friends.

I do love coffee shops. There’s real pleasure in sitting somewhere while a skilled barista hands you a drink that tastes like liquid joy. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that the coffee shop experience—lovely as it is—can mask something deeper. We prefer the neutrality: no cleaning, no preparing, no dishes. Great coffee, pleasant space, no emotional exposure. Someone else has tidied the room. Someone else carries the burden. And if the place is a mess, well, it’s certainly not our fault.These cafés are often designed to feel like a sprawling lounge, a kind of commercialised “home.” But they’re not home at all. And perhaps the very things we are trying to avoid—mess, effort, vulnerability—are the things we most need to practise.

Somewhere along the way, we decided it was better to keep everything at arm’s length. We prefer curated encounters: where we’re served but don’t serve, where no one sees our cluttered kitchens, and where we’re never confronted with the gentle discipline of hosting. And because our relationships increasingly happen in these curated spaces, the relationships themselves become curated too. If people can’t see the chaos in our homes, we never build the confidence to let them see the chaos in our hearts. If life happens mostly “out there” and not in our actual living spaces, we slowly lose the muscle memory of vulnerability, the small, ordinary acts that form deep friendship. We’re so afraid of what people might think that we never discover how much they might love us.

Coffee shops, of course, are nothing new. Back in the mid-1600s, they were already part of British life. But the role they played then was radically different. Those early coffee houses weren’t about cosy décor and laptop work; they were buzzing engines of social change. Ideas were born there. Debates erupted. Class boundaries dissolved. The first insurance broker, the early stock exchange, even the first public dolphin dissection—yes, really—took place in coffee houses.They were called “Penny Universities” because, for the price of a penny, anyone could walk in, be educated, join the conversation, and take part in the shaping of society.

But our modern “coffee shops” aren’t coffee houses. And this isn’t just a linguistic quirk. Something essential has shifted. Today’s cafés give us a curated half-experience: comforting, pleasant, but not stretching, not immersive, not truly communal.In them, amazing work is done—people design, write, calculate, create more than ever. But often at the cost of nuanced interaction. And by keeping people at arm’s length, I wonder what traits of human interaction we’re missing—what sharpening, softening, strengthening we forfeit when vulnerability is designed out of the room.

My local coffee shop sits in a strange little internet black spot. No matter where I sit, I can’t get a signal. When I asked the staff—thinking they might whisper a secret WiFi code to a loyal customer—they just smiled politely and said they didn’t have any. I think it’s brilliant.Deprived of the endless scroll, people start behaving… differently. First comes confusion, then mild panic, then resignation. Phones go down. Heads lift. After a few awkward minutes, someone turns to the person beside them and ventures a sentence like, “Terrible weather last night, wasn’t it?” or “Did you see they’re putting a new roundabout on the high street?” Nobody cares about the content. The words are simply social kindling—little sparks that warm us back into community.

We don’t have true coffee houses anymore, but I think we need them. We need places where ideas are tested, where disagreement is welcomed and socially possible, where diverse people share the same table. But perhaps even more than that, we need to reopen our homes. We need to rediscover the quiet bravery of letting people in, the lost art of ordinary vulnerability, the simplicity of sharing life without performance.

Those things aren’t nearly as daunting as we fear—and they may be exactly the things that form us most deeply.