So, uh, what’s the story here?

The Wandering Goblin is a concept borne out of spite. Or, more accurately, The Wandering Goblin is a concept borne as a reactionary movement against mediocre beverages and poor working conditions.

To give this claim a little context, I should probably explain my own background before we get to the shop. My name is Saul, and I’m the founder of TWG. For seven years before opening The Goblin, I’ve been working a range of jobs within specialty coffee - initially just to make ends meet doing a job I enjoy while I pursued creative endeavours, and then gradually (somehow) I became a career barista. I’ve worked in a few cities across the UK and US.

A lot of this was not a good time. Don’t get me wrong, loved the coffee side of it. But I saw abuses of power by management, and sleazy behaviour swept under the rug. It irritated the hell out of me at the time, but like a lot of people in hospitality I thought “Well, soon I’ll get out of this sh*thole. This is just hospitality, right? This is just how it is.” On top of that, a lot of these companies were serving mediocre products at premium prices. There’s no pride in that.

I got into a fair bit of hot water over the years for being bad at biting my tongue. I often questioned and called out what I felt was unjust, but at the end of the day I was just there to do a job, and I was replaceable. Hospitality staff are treated as disposable, so if I wanted to keep being able to pay my rent I had to swallow my pride and stick it out until I could jump ship to the next workplace and hope it was better.

I moved to Nottingham in the summer of 2021, and was greeted by some of the worst employment experiences so far. I won’t name names (online), but I’ve always been of the belief that if you can save someone else from the negative experience you’ve had, you should, and therefore it is your responsibility to share negative workplace experiences with others. Working for one of the more prolific Nottingham “independents” was the final straw for me. After they ignored multiple internal cases of harassment, cut my pay and gave me a disciplinary for complaining about it, and many of my coworkers left because of bullying from management, I decided I’d had enough.

The Wandering Goblin was originally a small trailer pulled behind my bicycle made from a pile of scrap wood, fuelled by a coal burning samovar, serving only filter coffee and loose leaf teas. I started running events in collaboration with By Our Hands We Make Our Way - a sober speakeasy every other Tuesday, and an early morning coffee social every Monday morning. Slowly TWG built a small loyal following, and traction was building.

Eventually, a cocktail bar approached me with a proposition. Why don’t I run a cafe out of their space during the day, and they run their bar at night? That way The Goblin could have a brick and mortar location without a lot of the crippling startup costs that prohibit a lot of new companies from getting off the ground. We made a deal, we set a timeline, I took out a loan and made a Kickstarter campaign, and prepared everything to fit out a fully-functional cafe. And then they pulled out at the very last minute, leaving me with thousands of pounds of financial risk hanging over me and two options.

Option one, I sell what I can, repay what debt I can, and pay off the remainder over the next two/three years working more of the same jobs. Option two was reshuffle the money that was left, put down a security deposit on a small unit on the edge of town that was in an absolute state, and gamble my livelihood on being able to turn it around in three weeks using only hand tools (no power in the unit), and generate enough money to stay afloat.

I went with option two, and now over a year later the shop continues to exist and thrive. The ethos is simple - one thing being good doesn’t have to come at a the cost of something else being worse. This applies to coffee, tea, pastries, and working conditions.

When I say The Wandering Goblin is borne out of spite, I don’t mean that as a negative. In any industry, if everyone who’s unhappy gets pissed off and leaves, then the only people left behind are people who are fine with the system as it exists. This removes internal pressure and drive for improvement. Someone has to stay behind and be pissed off and push for better. Hence, The Goblin was borne, out of spite. But like, in a hopeful way, y’know?