An article by Holly Stark, North Lincolnshire writer and MA Creative Writing graduate, University of Hull.
“Everything in the whole universe depends on one another.”
– Haemin Sunim, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down
There are few invitations I like more than: shall we go for a coffee?
Coffee can mean an hour catching up with somebody you haven’t seen in months. It can mean sitting alone with a book, watching people pass the window. It can be the first thing you make in the morning, still half-asleep, waiting for the day to begin.
For me, it is all of these things.
Recently, at Milchig in Paragon Arcade, I shared a grilled cheese and lemon meringue French toast over coffee with my sister. The combination sounds almost excessive written down, but that was part of the joy of it. Something savoury, something sweet, coffee between mouthfuls, plates passed back and forth across the table.
Milchig calls itself a neighbourhood coffee shop and café, which feels right. Tucked inside Paragon Arcade, among a collection of other independent businesses, it feels distinctly part of Hull rather than something that could have been dropped into any city centre.
That is one of the things I love about independent cafés. You remember them.
You remember the table you sat at. What you ordered. Who you were with. The walk there. The weather outside.
Coffee becomes attached to place.
At Flour & Feast on Humber Street, I recently had a raspberry and pistachio pastry, the sort of pastry that makes you stop talking for a second when you take the first bite.
Flour & Feast describes its ethos as “slow living”. Everything it sells in the bakery is made on the premises, with the rhythm of the day shaped around what is coming out of the oven. Breakfast first. Sweet bakes through the morning. Bread from around lunchtime.
There is coffee, pastry, bread and permission to linger.
It feels almost wonderfully simple.
And maybe that is what I want from a café.
Not efficiency. Not another thing to rush through. Somewhere to sit for a while.
We live in a culture that has become exceptionally good at removing waiting. Food arrives at our doors. Shopping appears the next day. Our phones fill the few spare seconds that once might have been spent looking out of a window.
Coffee asks for a little more time.
You wait for it to brew. You hold the cup while it is still too hot to drink. You sit opposite somebody and talk.
Even making coffee at home has its own rhythm.
Most mornings, mine starts with an AeroPress and coffee from Hull roastery Blending Room.
Scoop. Water. Wait. Press.
It is a tiny ritual, but an important one.
Blending Room has been roasting coffee in Hull since 2009. Its roastery is based on Boulevard, where it sources speciality coffee and roasts it here in the city.
I like knowing that.
Coffee itself has travelled much further. Before it reaches Hull, it has grown in another climate and another landscape, tended, harvested, processed and transported by people whose work is easy to overlook by the time we hold the finished cup.
Then somebody roasts it on Boulevard.
My sister grinds it in her kitchen.
I press it through an AeroPress.
I drink it while deciding what to do with my day.
A cup of coffee can contain a surprisingly long chain of human hands.
Maybe this is also why buying locally matters to me.
“Support local” is a phrase we hear so often that it can begin to lose some of its meaning. But really it describes thousands of very ordinary decisions.
Where shall we get coffee?
Where shall we buy bread?
Where shall we meet?
A few pounds spent in an independent café will not feel like an act of community building while you tap your card at the counter. You are probably thinking more about whether you want a flat white or a filter coffee.
But those choices accumulate.
They help independent businesses keep opening their doors. They support the people working inside them. They keep places like Paragon Arcade and Humber Street full of businesses with their own identities, menus and ideas.
And in return, those businesses give something back to the city.
They give us somewhere to go.
Somewhere for a first date or a long overdue catch-up. Somewhere to sit after shopping. Somewhere to work for an hour. Somewhere to take a friend visiting Hull. Somewhere to be alone without necessarily feeling lonely.
Coffee shops are full of people briefly sharing space.
At one table somebody is opening a laptop. At another, two friends are talking over each other. Someone comes in for a takeaway. Someone else has clearly decided they are staying for another cup.
Most of us will never speak to one another.
Still, for an hour, we are together.
That is what I mean when I think of coffee as a collective ritual.
It is not really about caffeine, although I am certainly grateful for that too.
It is the repeated act of gathering.
Humans have built rituals around food and drink for thousands of years. We eat together. Pour drinks for one another. Break bread. Put the kettle on when somebody comes round.
“Do you want a coffee?” rarely means only coffee.
It means sit down.
Tell me what has been happening.
Stay for a bit.
There are plenty of places to buy a cup in any city, and choosing an independent every single time is neither realistic nor necessary. But when I can, I like my coffee to have a little bit of Hull attached to it.
A pastry at Flour & Feast.
Lunch at Milchig.
Blending Room coffee pressed through my AeroPress each morning.
Small pleasures, but real ones.
A good coffee will not change the world. I don’t think it needs to.
Sometimes its value is simply in making an ordinary morning better. In giving two people a reason to sit across from each other. In keeping an independent business busy. In filling a room with the smell of coffee and something warm from the oven.
Maybe that is enough.
Because cities are built from these ordinary rituals too.
The places we return to.
The people we meet there.
The things we choose to keep alive.
And, very often, the cup of coffee between us.