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Coffee review Observations slow Tea

Rosie and Joe, St Giles churchyard

Coffee in a Wake Cup at Rosie & Joe in St Giles. The space rewards those who notice.

There is a long history of hospitality on the site of St Giles in the Fields stretching back far earlier than the Notes coffee barrow. But Rosie & Joe is a lovely iteration to that tradition. There’s a definite focus on tea at Rosie & Joe but the coffee is roasted by Square Mile and prepared on a La Marzocco machine. There is also a good selection of food to nibble on (as well as more food stalls nearby on weekday lunchtimes). And although it is a cart, there are a few seats and tables dotted around so it is easy to sit back and enjoy your coffee while the world races by.

St Giles High St is a very busy road and yet, sitting in the churchyard of St Giles is strangely peaceful. Despite the traffic and the occasional siren, it is one of those rare places in London that you can find the stillness to listen. A beautiful place to enjoy a coffee from an independent stall in fact! And if you have your own cup with you, there is even 10p off your coffee. The coffee was smooth and sweet, fruity but definitely a sweet and full bodied type of fruity cup. But why was it so peaceful? Was it merely that it was a lovely (but breezy) spring morning when I tried Rosie & Joe? Or was it that it is a small bit of nature in a built up environment? Both of these helped but I think it is also the way that the place rewards those who notice by offering more each time you look.
The ghost sign hidden behind the tree just outside the churchyard.

There’s the, perhaps slightly grim, history suggested by the fact that the ‘garden’ is significantly raised above the level of the pavement in parts. There’s the brickwork and stone walls of the church itself of course. The ‘ghost sign’ on a nearby building that is revealed to the coffee drinker by the fact that the tree between us and it has not yet got its summer leaves. And then the nod to the history of the site hinted at by the coffee cart itself: Since Matilda, wife of Henry I founded St Giles’ leprosy hospital on the site, a “cup of charity” was given to condemned prisoners as they made their way past St Giles on their way to their execution at Tyburn*. Very different now, but the tradition of refreshment for the traveller is continued.

But then a fire engine’s siren reminds you that you are in a cosmos, a universe filled with beautiful physics. You know whether the fire engine is approaching or has passed away from you from how the pitch of the sound changes as it goes past. The Doppler shift meaning that sound waves travelling towards you have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency, higher pitch) than those travelling away (longer wavelength, lower frequency, lower pitch). And part of the beauty of physics is that it is so universal; what works for sound also works for light. If an object emitting light is moving away from us, the light appears to have a longer wavelength (lower frequency, it is red-shifted) than if the same object were stationary or moving towards us where it would appear as if it emitted light with a shorter wavelength (higher frequency, blue shifted).

signboard at Rosie and Joe
Doesn’t a right imply a duty? There’s a lot that could be said about #supportindependent
So, similarly, if we were to look at the surface of a rotating planet and saw how the light reflected off that planet’s surface, the side of the planet that was rotating towards us would look ever so slightly bluer than the side rotating away from us which would look slightly redder. And if the planet’s surface was like Venus and obscured by clouds (rather like the ghost sign at Rosie & Joe will be obscured by leaves in a couple of months time) we could use the reflection of radio waves from the surface rather than visible light to see the same red-shift/blue-shift in the radio waves as the planet rotates**. In this way we could determine the direction of rotation of the planet and how fast it was rotating just as we get an indication of the speed of the fire engine from listening to the sound of the siren.

The siren takes us from a consideration of inner stillness to a recognition of the scale of the universe. Which is rather apt for a cafe in a churchyard, where the architecture of a church is often designed to be read symbolically, from the person to their place in the grand scheme of things***. One great thing about this particular cafe though was how much there was to see that cannot be included in this cafe-physics review for reasons of space. The location truly rewards those who pay attention to what they notice here. I can only recommend that you take some time out, take your re-usable cup and go to find some time to enjoy your coffee (or tea) in this quiet space in central London.

*The London Encyclopaedia, 3rd Edition, Weinreb et al., 2008

**Astronomy, the evolving universe, 6th Edition, Zeilik, 1991

***How to read a church, Taylor, 2003

Rosie and Joe can be found in St Giles in the Fields churchyard, Monday-Friday.