WatchHouse

Roland Horne opened the first WatchHouse in 2014 inside a genuine watch house on Bermondsey Street, an octagonal building put up around 1810 to shelter men guarding the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen next door from grave robbers, a use the brand's name still points back to. The room seats only about ten people, yet the shop reportedly serves hundreds of customers a day, a tardis effect the company likes to joke about in its own description of the place.

From that single room, WatchHouse grew into a chain of roughly twenty five houses across London, Bath and now New York, roasting its own coffee since 2020 out of a railway arch on nearby Maltby Street on a refurbished 1959 Probat UG22 under Head Roaster Nikol Novotná. A 2024 crowdfunding round pulled in 7.2 million pounds from more than 1,400 small investors, reportedly the largest all equity raise in UK hospitality history, but the original Bermondsey Street house has kept its scale and its odd, memorable shape.