Specialty coffee in London.

London has been drinking coffee since 1652, when a stall opened in an alley off Cornhill, and it has been drinking good coffee since 1978, when Anita Le Roy and Nicholas Saunders started roasting in a basement on Monmouth Street. The modern scene arrived in the 2000s with a coffee cart on Broadway Market, a Soho café called Flat White, and two world titles won in the same year by the people who then founded Square Mile.

What makes London its own place is where the roasting happens. The city never pushed its roasters out to the edge: they moved into Victorian railway arches in Bermondsey and Hackney, into a fire station in Brixton and a steelworks in Homerton, and the arches turned out to be perfect for a drum roaster. Add the Antipodeans, who brought all-day dining and the flat white, and a prison roastery that trains people for jobs on the outside, and you have a scene with more going on than most.

It is also a scene that talks about money. London roasters print farm-gate prices on bags, publish impact reports, and argue about the rising cost of green coffee and gas on festival panels. The London Coffee Festival at the Truman Brewery is where that argument happens every May.

Three kinds of roaster share the city. The wholesale houses, Square Mile in Walthamstow and Redemption in Wembley among them, roast for cafés, offices and subscribers and rarely run a counter at the plant. The roastery-restaurants, Caravan in Islington, Ozone on Leonard Street, WatchHouse on Maltby Street, put the machine behind glass and serve breakfast in front of it. And the chains that roast for their own bars: Kiss the Hippo from Richmond, Monmouth from Bermondsey for its three shops.

Then the independents that give the city its texture. Climpson & Sons in London Fields, a B Corp with a training arch and a Broadway Market café. Workshop, roasting light and clean and supplying the grand hotels. Assembly and Volcano sharing the Brixton fire station. Dark Arts, roasting darker than its neighbours under motorcycle and occult artwork. Carnival in Penge, Perky Blenders in Walthamstow, Mission Coffee Works, Union, Old Spike, Plot, Campbell & Syme, Notes and HEJ fill the shelves between.

Anita Le Roy has run Monmouth for nearly fifty years. James Hoffmann won the world barista title in 2007, co-founded Square Mile, wrote the atlas and helped design an espresso machine you will see on many London bars. Anette Moldvaer won the cup-tasting world title the same year and buys Square Mile's coffee. Gwilym Davies won the barista title in 2009 and co-founded Prufrock with Jeremy Challender. Ian Burgess pushed the cart that became Climpson's. Miles Kirby and Laura Harper-Hinton brought New Zealand all-day dining to Exmouth Market. Max Dubiel and Ted Rosner built Redemption with the prison service. Can Eren founded Kiss the Hippo. And Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood won the UK barista title three times and co-wrote the book on water.

London roasts under its railways. Follow the viaducts and you find the machines.

The flat white: a double shot under fine microfoam in a small ceramic cup, the drink Soho imported in 2005 and the city never gave back. Oat milk is on every bar, often without a surcharge, and batch brew keeps the queue moving. On the shelf, Colombia, Brazil and Ethiopia lead London's listed origins, washed leads the processes with natural behind it.

The roast follows the milk. Londoners like their filter light and their espresso rounder, so the house blends, Square Mile's Red Brick, Climpson's Baron, Caravan's Daily, are built for chocolate and toffee under foam rather than the Nordic edge. The top shelf is where Gesha and Sudan Rume live, and where the prices climb. Bag sizes are a London quirk too: Square Mile sells in a larger bag, Assembly in a smaller one, Workshop in one sized for a letterbox. The live count stands at 35 decaf and 37 filter-friendly listings.

London's roasters price in pounds; the figures here are in euros so you can compare across the directory. They come from every London coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €64 per kilogram, about €16 for a standard bag.

The ladder reads like this: house espresso blends around €55 per kilogram, washed East Africans and the first experimental lots from about €76 per kilogram, and the most expensive listing right now at €194 per kilogram. 280 coffees carry a price today. Nearly every roaster runs a subscription, and the bigger ones ship worldwide.