With a gleaming white La Marzocco FB80 espresso machine for an altar and a pop-up tent for a canopy, barista Gennaro Di Mattia presides on hallowed ground. When the clouds open a path for the sun into the narrow churchyard beside St George’s Bloomsbury, his humble Espresso Base is transformed, as if by divine decree, into one of London’s most enchanted coffee sanctuaries.

It’s not too bad on rainy days either, although takeaway might then be the preferred option. The coffee, from the nearly infallible roaster Has Bean, is handled and brewed with care and quiet elegance by Di Mattia. There are superior London baristas and coffees shops, sure, but none with this glorious church designed by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as their backdrop.

Espresso Base is a mere 443 feet from the British Museum (see map), a fact lost on 5.59999999 million of the 5.6 million visitors last year to the UK’s most popular cultural attraction. Coffee-loving, tourist-phobic Londoners might say this is most fortunate, a selfish view I would respond to with perhaps more sympathy than Di Mattia, his partner Vittorio Caberlotto or their creditors.