The George is a seventeenth-century coaching inn that stands near the site of the old Tabard Inn, where the Canterbury Tales begins. Travel back and forth between London and Canterbury happened for religious reason as well as pleasure.

The Dominican monks, colloquially called the Blackfriars because of their black habits, had an impressive monastery after which this area of London is named. After intense involvement in Henry VIII’s love life, they were dissolved along with all of England’s other orders.

After the bubonic plague became endemic in Europe, Londoners came up with ways to protect their community against infection, such as the Pesthouse.

The story of how coffee of arrived in London, not from Italy or America, but from the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. It tasted bitter, but also of Islam and the East. This is how England learnt to love the ‘wine of Islam’ and the ‘Vertue[s] of the Coffee Drink’.