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The most beautiful streets in London: squares, mews and lanes, some of them famous and some that take finding.
Flagstones between a church wall and a hanging lantern, and the place London first drank coffee.
Lanes & alleys
St Michael's Alley leaves Cornhill through a gap you could walk past, runs down the flank of St Michael's church, and comes out among Castle Court, Ball Court and Bell Inn Yard - a knot of passages the Victorian City built around rather than through. Flagstones underfoot, blackened stone one side, and the Jamaica Wine House's lantern hanging out over the far end of it.
A plaque on that wall says what happened here: “Here stood the first London coffee house at the sign of the Pasqua Rosee's Head, 1652.” Pasqua Rosee was a manservant brought to London from Ottoman Smyrna by Daniel Edwards, a merchant dealing in coffee and other goods from the east; accounts call him Armenian, or Sicilian. The two fell out, and Rosee set up on his own with Edwards's former coachman, selling a drink almost nobody in England had tasted. Coffee houses multiplied through the City after him and became where the business of it was actually done - the news read aloud, cargoes and insurance argued over, a penny at the door and anybody could sit down.
Three old taverns stand in the same knot of passages. The Jamaica Wine House is on the site itself, the George and Vulture is through Castle Court - Dickens lodged Mr Pickwick there - and Simpson's Tavern is up Ball Court.
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Photo by James Petts, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Photo by Bashereyre at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons · Photo by Jim Linwood, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.