I came across the concept of ‘Viennese Coffee House Culture’ at least 10 years ago. It stuck in my head because it sounded fantastic, in both senses of the word:
Extremely good
Imaginative or fanciful; removed from reality1
Apparently, in Vienna, you can spend hours on end in beautiful coffee houses for the price of a single cup of coffee. You will not be hurried. You will have access to a range of newspapers. And, most importantly, you will be surrounded by openminded, thoughtful people from all walks of life, ready to talk about the big issues of the day: politics, philosophy, art, poetry, and music.
Ok this an idealised description, but it’s an ideal that is so important to Viennese culture that in 2011, Viennese Coffee House Culture was recognised by UNESCO as a form of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”.
According to the UNESCO website, it “is characterised by a very special atmosphere. Typical elements of a Viennese coffeehouse are small marble-topped tables on which the coffee is served, Thonet chairs, alcoves, newspaper tables, and interior design details in the style of Historicism. The coffeehouse is a place “in which time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is listed on the bill.”2
Kaffeehauskultur is further credited with the development of many great ideas, novels, paintings, and music because it brought people together and created the preconditions for them to inspire one another.
Coffee flows, opinions circulate, connections are made.
“This melting pot of minds almost certainly played a part, for example, in the arrival and evolution of Vienna Modernism: the explosion of creativity and progress in the late 1800s and early 1900s.”3
At that time, many Viennese considered the coffee houses to be their ‘public living rooms’4, meeting friends and family there, but always with the possibility of encountering somebody new.
London’s equivalent ‘public living room’ is the pub.
Pubs might not achieve the same level of aesthetic grandeur as the Viennese Coffee House, but they have their own traditional charm and can serve a similar purpose.
Pubs, or ‘public houses’, are by definition never private. They centre around alcohol rather than coffee, but they share the same spirit of leaving you in peace to nurse a drink rather than hassling you for your table. And historically, they too have been important meeting places for thinkers, revolutionaries, writers, artists and so on.5
In 2012 a group of architectural students launched a campaign to get London Pub Culture listed as UNESCO world heritage. But it hasn’t happened yet.6
Sadly, pubs aren’t doing as well as they used to.
According to the Guardian:
“One pub a day disappeared for good in England and Wales during 2025 as sustained cost pressures continued to weigh heavily on the sector.” With “every region of England and Wales recording a net loss of pubs during 2025”.7
Pub closures are largely attributed to rising costs and cautious spending8, and sometimes to changing generational drinking behaviours.9
But despite these dispiriting developments, pubs remain critical meeting places, perhaps more so than ever before.
Although the smartphone is, in many ways, an obstacle to striking up conversations with strangers10, in one way, it is conducive.
Apps like Meetup and TribeIRL enable straightforward assembly in public places with minimal admin. Organisers post an event online and people who want to meet other people show up.
The combination of these new tools for gathering and old public living rooms has led to the development of a rich scene of pub-based discussion groups in London (and beyond).
It was only after I launched THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS, that I realised I was in such good company. Attendees recommended other groups and I became aware of a wide range of philosophy discussion groups, most of which met in pubs (despite often including the term ‘cafe’ in their title, e.g. Philosophy Café London and London Philosophy Café).
Maybe we are building a new form of intangible cultural heritage. Or maybe we’re just reinventing what worked in Viennese Coffee Houses at the turn of the 20th century.
The three key ingredients insofar as I can see them:
Comfortable venues with a low barrier to entry - cheap/free tickets, no pressure to buy more than one drink
Understanding that its acceptable to talk to strangers - sometimes an invitation is necessary to counteract smartphone induced timidity
Opportunity to become a regular - repeated events in the same place
When these conditions cooccur, communities form, pubs become vibrant, and people inspire one another.
I wonder whether there’s a similar modern meetup scene in Viennese Coffee Houses - Viennese readers, please let me know!
And if you’d like to be part of building this intangible cultural phenomenon in London, please join us at THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS.
In writing this, I discovered that one of the pubs we meet in regularly for THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS, The Fitzroy Tavern, was originally a German coffee house. It also happens to be a pub that many artists and writers frequented, including Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, and Walter Sickert - https://fitzroytavern.co.uk/about/