Cafe owners seeking convivial atmosphere as well as better turnover are starting to deter remote workers

“To the Coffee-house, and there all the house full of the discourse of the great fire,” wrote Samuel Pepys of his trip to a 17th-century cafe – then the social nerve centre of London’s gossiping elite.

Fast forward to the 21st century and the chattering classes have been replaced with the clattering classes – remote workers busily hammering away on their laptop keyboards and shouting on video calls to be heard over the mechanical grinding of coffee beans.