Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "pub-quiz"

Meeting up for a coffee is nothing new, in England the first coffee house was opened in 1652 and the new experience of coffee was joined a few years later by drinking chocolate. Samuel Pepys declared that drink an excellent cure for hangovers and other ills. It seems the early coffee houses banned women; imagine the expression on the faces of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century men if they could see modern coffee shops full of young mums and prams. A destination and a meeting place in every town, sometimes tiny and independent, others belonging to corporate chains.
A few years back, Woolworths finally collapsed in the recession, a sad day for those of us who had been shopping in its branches all our lives; buying presents for our parents, pick-a-mix sweets, records, then DVDs, children's clothes. Suddenly there was a Woolworths size gap in high streets across the country. Many became 99 Pence or Pound Shops.
But in Southbourne Grove our Woolworths shell underwent an enterprising transformation and the 'Ludo Lounge' came into being. A lounge bar with a 'used Retro' look, old wooden tables with church pews and school chairs to sit on, made more comfortable with scatterings of cushions. Here from 9a.m. to 11p.m. you can meet for coffee, eat all day, take part in a weekly 'pub quiz', choose a book from the community shelf, read free newspapers or play scrabble. Families welcome, adults come for an evening out. The staff are young and cheerful.
Perhaps the biggest difference to Samuel Pepys' day is free WiFi, one of the reasons why coffee shops abound, you can relax and still keep in touch with the rest of the world. No doubt Samuel Pepys and the other men who conducted their business over coffee would have loved the internet.