Britain’s coffee story starts in a tea shop.

By 1922, J. Lyons & Co had 160 teashops in London alone, and seven million people drank Lyons tea each week beneath the famous gold-on-white art nouveau lettering. Coffee was on the menu, but it was a footnote. The waitresses, selected by the company for deportment, hand condition, and ability to add up, brought a “small or large” with consistent, brisk efficiency.

Before the war, coffee in Britain was largely chicory-laced, often instant, and not the point.

The war did not change this situation. If anything, it reinforced tea’s grip. NAAFI sold 3.5 million cups daily at its peak. Mobile canteens-the Austin tea wagons-brought Twinings, not espresso, to bombed streets and remote anti-aircraft sites. WVS volunteers, over a million by the war’s end, handed tin mugs to firemen pulling bodies from rubble. “You had to smile no matter how tired you were,” one canteen worker recalled. “The boys needed you to be cheerful.” The brew was strong, sweet, and served by the gallon.

Coffee’s arrival came courtesy of an Italian dental equipment salesman called Pino Riservato. Travelling Britain in 1951, he was so appalled by what passed for coffee, often chicory water, that he started importing Gaggia machines. Nobody would buy them. So in 1953, he opened his own bar, the Moka, in a bomb-damaged launderette at 29 Frith Street. Gina Lollobrigida cut the ribbon. Within months, it was selling over a thousand espressos a day. By 1956, London had four hundred coffee bars. Teenagers, too young for the pub, finally had somewhere to flirt and listen to skiffle. As John Sutherland later wrote, the espresso “felt smart as hell.”

However, this lively period faded. Then came the long doze. The Sixties to the Nineties were an instant-coffee desert: Mellow Birds, Maxwell House, the kettle. In 1998, Starbucks paid eighty-three million dollars for a London outfit called the Seattle Coffee Company. They repainted fifty-six doors green and unleashed the grande caramel macchiato on an unsuspecting high street. Costa and Caffè Nero grew in their wake. We, the British, against all odds, learned to order coffee in Italian.

The fourth act is still running. Antipodean expats brought the flat white over in the noughties, and with it, a new species: the barista as artisan, the single-origin espresso, the V60 dripper and chalkboard tasting notes. Then came Monmouth, Workshop, Square Mile. Now, at a decent café in Brighton or Bristol, you might be asked which Ethiopian washed-process you prefer.

A nation that once asked “small or large?” now has a multitude of decisions.