16 cafés in 7 citys. Places change: check opening hours before you go.
Housed in what it calls the oldest house in Bath, this eating house is named after Sally Lunn, a Huguenot baker of the 1680s who is credited with the large, soft bun still served here. A small museum in the cellar shows the old kitchen.
Order: Sally Lunn bun, sweet or savoury · Morning coffee
💡 Daytime visits need no booking, except the 3:30pm afternoon tea; see the kitchen museum downstairs.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed these tearooms for Kate Cranston, down to the chairs and waitress uniforms; they opened in 1903. Restored and reopened in 2018, they were renamed The Mackintosh Tearooms in February 2026 under the National Trust for Scotland.
Order: Afternoon tea · Tea and scones
💡 Ask for the first-floor Room de Luxe, the most famous of Mackintosh's rooms.
Swiss confectioner Frederick Belmont opened the first Bettys in Harrogate in 1919; the tea room moved to its current Parliament Street home in 1976. The family business has kept every one of its tea rooms in Yorkshire rather than expand further.
Order: Afternoon tea · Taylors of Harrogate coffee · Swiss-style cakes from the counter
💡 Queues build by late morning; arrive at opening or go mid-afternoon on a weekday.
Founded in 1887 by an Algerian, M. Siari, this Soho shop is often called the oldest coffee shop in London. Wooden shelves of beans and tea fill the narrow room.
Order: Freshly roasted coffee beans by weight · Loose-leaf tea
💡 It's a shop, not a sit-down café; come to buy beans to take home.
The Polledri family opened Bar Italia in 1949 and still run it. The building is where John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in 1926, and Pulp wrote a song about the place.
Order: Espresso at the counter · Cappuccino
💡 Look up for the blue plaque marking Baird's television demonstration.
Opened in 1871 by a French communard named Bertaux, it is London's oldest pâtisserie. Sisters Michele and Tania Wade have run it since 1988, with an art gallery upstairs.
Order: Éclairs or cream cakes · Pot of tea or coffee
💡 Tables are few and close together; take pastries away if it's full.
Founded in 1654 by Cirques Jobson, a Levantine Jew from Syria, it claims to be the oldest continually serving coffee house in Europe, though it has been on its current site only since 1970. Jeremy Bentham is said to have first conceived Utilitarianism here.
Order: Coffee · Traditional British breakfast · Homemade Turkish sweets
The Grand Café says it stands on the site of England's first coffee house, opened in 1650. Today it serves cream teas, high teas and coffee on Oxford's High Street.
Order: Cream tea · Coffee
💡 Queen's Lane Coffee House, with its own 1654 claim, is just across the street, so you can try both.
Bettys opened its York tea room in 1937. During the Second World War its basement bar was a haunt of Allied airmen, who scratched their signatures into a mirror with a diamond pen; the mirror is still on display.
Order: Afternoon tea · A pot of tea with a Yorkshire curd tart
💡 Ask to see the airmen's mirror downstairs.
Opened in 1900 by Tuscan immigrants and still run by the Pellicci family, this East End café has a Grade II listed Art Deco interior. It is one of the best surviving examples of the Italian-run London 'caff'.
Order: Full English breakfast · Strong mug of coffee or tea
💡 Open Monday to Saturday, 8am to 3pm; closed Sundays.
Inspired by the coffee houses of Istanbul, Ottoman specialises in slow-brewed cezve (Turkish) coffee alongside espresso. It was ranked No. 6 in Europe and the top UK café on the 2026 World's 100 Best Coffee Shops list.
Order: Cezve Turkish coffee · Single-origin espresso
Kiss the Hippo roasts organic coffee at its own London roastery and says all of its coffee is certified carbon negative. Its Richmond café is a short walk from Richmond station.
Order: Single-origin filter · Flat white
Fewer recent sources for this one: check it's open before you go.
Nicholas Saunders and Anita Le Roy started Monmouth here in 1978, roasting in the basement of an 18th-century house. Many of its baristas went on to found London's third-wave cafés after 2000.
Order: Filter coffee of the day · Flat white
💡 The Borough Market shop is larger and busier; Covent Garden is the original.
A roomy specialty café on Leather Lane, beside the weekday street market near Hatton Garden. It has long been one of the fixed stops on London's specialty coffee map.
Order: Batch brew filter · Espresso
💡 Pair it with lunch from the Leather Lane street market on weekdays.
Fewer recent sources for this one: check it's open before you go.
Opened in the City of London in 2018, Rosslyn was ranked No. 12 in Europe on the 2026 World's 100 Best Coffee Shops list. It is built for speed, serving office crowds without cutting corners on the coffee.
Order: Flat white · Filter of the week
💡 Weekday mornings are busy with commuters; go mid-morning.
Fewer recent sources for this one: check it's open before you go.
A small café on Skye that takes its cues from Australian coffee culture and roasts its beans on the island. It made the 2026 World's 100 Best Coffee Shops list, one of only two UK cafés to do so.
Order: Flat white · Filter of island-roasted beans
💡 There is a second Birch in Inverness if you're heading back to the mainland.