The Wren Coffee Shop

The Wren is a coffee shop located in St Nicholas Cole Abbey near St Paul’s Cathedral in central London.

It opened in March 2014 and the same year won the award for the best new coffee shop in London and since then has been regularly featured in publications one of the top coffee shops in London. You can find it at at 114 Queen Victoria Street, City of London, EC4V 4BJ.

How We Started The Business

ARTICLE: Here I go through how we started the coffee shop and more importantly, why.

In 2013 I was speaking to a friend at my local church and started to lament how there are so many amazing church buildings in the city of London that are not being used throughout the week. At that point the idea of setting up a coffee shop in one was born and we proceeded to approach local churches to pitch them our idea. St Nicholas Cole Abbey was the first to agree.

Six months, a lot of money and a huge amount of work later and The Wren opened for business. Read the article above for more details.

The Wren is a not-for-profit. All profit goes to support the work of the Centre For Workplace Ministry.

Tools We Utilise

The day-to-day running of The Wren is managed by a full-time staff. It is a very traditional business but I use some tools to monitor it.

• Bookkeeping is doing using Xero.
• The till system uses VendHQ.

What We Plan For The Future

We have since been approached by other churches asking if we would like to launch a similar business in their spaces. At the moment we have turned down every offer and do not currently have any plans for expansion.