About this objectThe Hitchin Cocoa and Coffee House stood alongside what is now the museum entrance on Brand Street, Hitchin, from around the 1870s. The Cocoa and Coffee house was part of a wider temperance movement against alcohol.
North Hertfordshire Museum's first virtual volunteer Jennie Gillons chose to research this object as part of a task to research five objects that interested her, in January 2022. Hitchin has a long Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) history, and many Quakers were active in the Victorian temperance movement – which was partly a response to the effects of cheap alcohol on people living in poverty. The Cocoa and Coffee House was close to what is now the Quaker meeting house at 1 Paynes Park; in the 1870s the site was a Quaker burial ground. At the start of the 20th century, the establishment was called The Coffee Rooms, and had an adjoined Temperance Hotel.
