The first English coffee-house was opened in Oxford in 1650, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the coffee-house had become the regular resort of every Londoner who could afford to pay the twopence for the dish of the beverage which admitted him to its society. Men of similar tastes assembled at the same house, so that gradually each of the principal coffee-houses became a centre for a particular kind of society. Thus Will's (p. 3, 1. 17), at the corner of Russell Street and Bow Street, Covent Garden, which had been Dryden's favourite coffee-house, became the haunt of the wits and men of letters; it was from here that Steele dated his articles on poetry for the Tatler. St. James's (p. 3, 1. 22) in St. James's Street, was frequented by politicians and men of fashion; it was a Whig house, and the head quarters of the Tatler's foreign and domestic news (cf. Spectator 403). The Grecian (p. 3, 1. 25), Devereux Court, Temple, was the oldest of all the London coffee-houses; here gathered the barristers of the Temple, and here the Tatler finds the material of his papers on learning, while men from the Exchange assembled at Jonathan's (p. 3, 1. 29) in Exchange Alley, and doctors, clerics, and men of science from the Royal Society at Child's (p. 3, 1. 19), in St. Paul's Churchyard. Coffee-houses were very numerous; we find mention within the limits of these papers of two others, Jenny Mann's (p. 24, 1. 24), in the Tilt-Yard, Charing-Cross, and Squire's (p. 117, 1. 23), in Fulwood's Rents, Holborn, and Ashton gives the names of between four and five hundred, while three thousand are known to have existed in 1708.

There were also a few chocolate-houses, notably White's and the Cocoa-Tree (p. 3, 1. 25), the Tory centre, both in St. James's Street. White's was a great gambling-house; Steele dated from it his articles on Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment, and its destruction by fire, which took place in 1723, is depicted as the scene of Plate VI of Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, in which the Rake ruins himself by gaming.