It all began one night crossing the North Sea, on a boat from Harwich to Rotterdam and then onwards overland all the way to Central Asia. Via ferries, buses, trains and cargo ships, I made my way to Kyrgyzstan, where I ended up spending a couple of years teaching in the capital city of Bishkek.

Whilst living in Kyrgyzstan, I started learning Russian. Even after two years my level never really got much beyond basic conversations and I wanted to continue practicing when I got back home to the UK. Instead of lessons in a classroom, I was looking for a relaxed, social setting to speak my broken Russian.

I wanted to find a cosy cafe that could host our classes in the evenings once it had closed for the day. A friend told me about Arthur's Coffee House in Ravenscourt Park and it was perfect, so we started putting on French, Italian and Spanish classes on Wednesday evenings. We even spent a few months running a translated literature bookshop at the back of the cafe, closing this once it became apparent it was going to make us no money!

Luckily for us, we had more success with the conversation classes. It seemed there were lots of other people who also wanted an informal place to practice speaking foreign languages, with the atmosphere created at Arthur's exactly what I had hoped it would be. Sadly for me, there was perhaps predictably little demand for Russian but we have now added Japanese alongside our original three languages, with German soon to join.

The plan is to partner with more cafes around London to have classes happening each week in different areas of the city. One day, we also hope to open our own space to create a real hub for our community.

Hope to see you at Arthur's soon for a conversation class. To stay in touch, join our WhatsApp community and sign up to our newsletter in the footer of our website.

Tim, founder