Steep StreetCoffee House

Alice Larkin and Stephen Brothwell left their Brighton jobs to open a literary coffee house on Folkestone's Old High Street — the cobbled climb of the Creative Quarter — with walls lined floor to ceiling in poetry, local literature and classics, all browsable and most buyable, in the manner of the Parisian book cafés the shop admits to imitating. There is no fixed menu; the kitchen makes what it makes each day, on site, and the coffee holds up its end. From half past seven each morning, which for a bookish room is an honest working start.