Nando's Coffee House

Nando's was a coffee house in Fleet Street in London. It was known to exist in 1696, being the subject of a conveyance, and was popular in the 18th century, especially with the legal profession in the nearby courts and chambers.

"Law and equity, or A peep at Nando's": a cartoon from 1787, depicting Edward Thurlow in his Chancellor's wig, approaching the bar at Nando's

The name is thought to be a contraction of "Ferdinand's" or "Ferdinando's",[1] and its exact address is given variously as somewhere between 15[1] and 17[2] Fleet Street. David Hughson wrote in 1807 that Nando's occupied the building at 15 Fleet Street[1] which was previously the Rainbow Coffee House.[3]

The venue was a favourite haunt of Edward Thurlow, who became Lord Chancellor, and he was satirised as being enamoured of the landlady's attractive daughter.[4]

Charles Lamb refers to Nando's in his essay "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," writing, "Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, 'The Chronicle is in hand, Sir.'"[5]

See also

References
  1. Norman, Philip (1905). London Vanished & Vanishing. Macmillan.
  2. Timbs, John (1872). Club Life of London.
  3. Hughson, David (1807). London.
  4. Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Peter Cunningham (2011), London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, 2, Cambridge University Press, pp. 571–572, ISBN 9781108028073
  5. Lamb, Charles (1949). Brown, John Mason (ed.). The Portable Charles Lamb. New York: Viking. p. 442.

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