Bond Street Coffee: An Independent Speciality Coffee Shop in Brighton
I opened Bond Street Coffee at 15 Bond Street, right in the centre of Brighton, back in 2014. More than a decade later, we’re still here, still fiercely independent and still serving speciality coffee in Brighton every day.
A lot has changed over those years. Coffee has changed, Brighton has changed, and I’ve definitely changed. But the basic idea behind Bond Street has stayed surprisingly similar: serve really good, seasonal, single origin coffee in a friendly Brighton coffee shop where people actually want to spend time.
These days, all the coffee we serve is roasted by me at Freda Coffee, my independent Sussex coffee roastery. Bond Street is effectively the home of Freda. It’s where I get to make espresso with the coffees I roast, serve them to customers and work out what I can do better with the next roast.
But Bond Street existed long before Freda, so I should probably start at the beginning.
Serving Speciality Coffee in Brighton Since 2014
Bond Street Coffee started as a partnership between me, Bradley and Amelia from Horsham Coffee Roaster.
At the time, I was working part-time with them at the roastery while also working as a barista at Coffee at 33 on Trafalgar Street in Brighton. That was really where I started to understand what good speciality coffee could be, and it gave me a proper introduction to Brighton’s growing coffee scene.
When an opportunity came up to take over a little café on Bond Street that Horsham was already supplying with coffee, we decided to go into business together.
We didn't have a huge amount of money. We pooled together what savings we had, spent a frightening amount of it on a Synesso espresso machine, solicitors' fees and a rent deposit, and somehow built our first coffee shop.
I've had a few other cafés come and go since then, but Bond Street has always meant something different to me.
It's the one that's still here.
We made it through the difficult bits, COVID, rising costs and all the other challenges that come with running a small independent café. Somehow we've kept opening the doors every morning and continuing to serve coffee in Brighton year after year.
And I'm incredibly proud of that.
Why We've Always Served Single Origin Coffee
From the beginning, our plan was to serve single origin speciality coffee.
If you've spent any time looking around the Freda website, you'll probably already know that I don't really love coffee blends. I find it much more interesting to drink a coffee from a particular farm, producer or region and taste something that reflects where that coffee has come from.
So even when Horsham Coffee Roaster supplied the café, we chose to serve single origin coffees rather than having one generic house blend.
We took quite a lot of inspiration from speciality coffee shops like Full Court Press in Bristol and Colonna & Small's in Bath. I loved the idea of walking into a coffee shop and being able to choose between different coffees rather than simply ordering “a flat white”.
That's something we've always tried to keep at Bond Street, and I still think it’s one of the things that makes the café a little different within the wider Brighton coffee scene.
Normally, there will be two or three different single origin coffees available for you to try. You might order the same drink with two completely different coffees and taste how much the origin changes what's in the cup.
I always think of it a bit like wine.
I don't know an enormous amount about wine. Give me one glass and I can tell you whether I like it, but put three different wines next to each other and suddenly the differences become much easier to notice.
Coffee is exactly the same.
You don't need to understand processing methods, varieties or extraction percentages. Try two flat whites made with two different coffees next to each other and I think almost anyone can tell that they taste different.
That's the bit I find exciting.
The Home of Freda Coffee
In 2022, Bradley and Amelia left the business and I took over Bond Street myself.
Today, the coffee we serve is roasted by Freda Coffee, my independent speciality coffee roastery here in Sussex.
Our two regular house coffees are Black Dog and Black Rain. They're both seasonal, single origin espressos rather than blends. The actual coffee and farm behind them changes throughout the year as different harvests become available, but I look for coffees that fit the flavour profile I want for each one.
Black Rain is roasted slightly darker and is the more traditional, comforting espresso. Black Dog is lighter and gives me a little more room to bring out the acidity, vibrancy and character of the coffee.
We'll usually have other seasonal coffees available alongside them too, particularly for filter coffee.
For me, one of the best things about running both a coffee roastery and a Brighton coffee shop is that I actually get to work with the coffees I roast.
I can roast a coffee one day, then a little while later be standing behind the bar at Bond Street pulling shots of it as espresso. I can see how easy it is for the baristas to dial in, taste it in a flat white, brew it as filter coffee and then use all of that information when I'm working on the next roast.
That direct connection between roasting and serving coffee is something I really value. It means Freda isn’t just a roastery supplying a café somewhere else. The coffee is roasted, tested, adjusted and then actually served to customers here in Brighton.
I think there's something quite special about having that connection all the way from choosing a green coffee and roasting it through to handing the finished cup to someone across the bar.
Accidentally Becoming a Very Vegan-Friendly Café
Around ten years ago, I went vegan.
Bond Street didn't open as a vegan café. I wasn't even vegan when we opened. But over the years, something happened quite organically to our cake counter.
I kept introducing more vegan cakes and pastries because, selfishly, I wanted to be able to eat the things we were selling while I was at work.
Slowly, the non-vegan things disappeared.
These days our cake counter is vegan, and I really like the fact that I can eat absolutely everything in it. We still serve dairy milk alongside our plant-based options, so I've never really thought of Bond Street as specifically a vegan café.
We're just an independent Brighton coffee shop that happens to have a lot of very good vegan cake.
A Brighton Coffee Shop Without Wi-Fi
There's another slightly unusual thing about Bond Street: we don't have Wi-Fi.
We used to.
Then one day I walked into the café and noticed that almost every table had one person sitting at it silently working on a laptop.
There wasn't anything particularly wrong with that, but the whole café suddenly felt like an office.
It made me a little sad.
One of my favourite things about working in cafés has always been the noise. People meeting friends, customers talking to the baristas, regulars bumping into each other and conversations happening between people who might otherwise never have met.
So we got rid of the Wi-Fi.
It probably sounds like a slightly strange decision for a coffee shop in Brighton in 2026, but I love what it's done to the café.
When Bond Street is full and there's a proper bustle of conversation in the room, that's when I like it most.
Proud to Be Part of Brighton's Independent Coffee Scene
I've been making coffee professionally since around 2008, although I'd hesitate to call much of what I made in those first few years “speciality coffee”.
My real introduction to Brighton's speciality coffee scene came in 2011 when I started working at Coffee at 33 on Trafalgar Street.
Taras and Ame taught me an enormous amount about coffee, but more importantly, they created the kind of independent coffee shop that made me want to have one of my own.
I think that sort of inspiration is quite rare.
Brighton's coffee scene has changed enormously since then. Brilliant cafés have opened, brilliant cafés have disappeared, and countless people I've worked alongside have gone on to open places of their own.
That’s one of the things I love about coffee in Brighton. There’s a real independent culture here, and so many cafés have their own way of doing things rather than all trying to look and taste the same.
Somehow, Bond Street has kept going through all of it.
More than a decade after we opened, I still get to walk into our little independent coffee shop in Brighton, make coffee, talk to regulars and be part of a community I've been involved with for most of my adult life.
Running an independent café is definitely not an easy way to make money. But for me, it's always been about more than that.
It's the people, the conversations, the coffee and the strange little community that builds around a room with an espresso machine in it.
So if you're looking for speciality coffee in Brighton, come and find us on Bond Street. Have a coffee, try a couple of different single origins and see if you can taste the difference.
I still enjoy getting up in the morning and going to work there.
After all these years, I think that's pretty special.
Visit Bond Street Coffee
15 Bond Street
Brighton
BN1 1RD
Monday – Friday: 8am – 5pm
Saturday: 9am – 5pm
Sunday: 10am – 5pm
If you're looking for specialty coffee in Brighton, we'd love to see you.