14/07/2026
🎉 Happy Birthday to the Well Bean Café! ☕️
We are delighted to celebrate the Well Bean Café’s third birthday!
This wonderful community space is going from strength to strength, serving some of the best tea and coffee in Harpenden. 💜
The Well Bean Café is based upstairs at the Harpenden Trust Centre at 130A Southdown Road and is open to everyone from 10.30am - 12.30pm, Monday to Friday. ✨
It is run completely by volunteers and all money raised goes directly to supporting the work of the Harpenden Trust. 🥰
Julia Pryor, Café Team Leader explains why the Café is so popular. She says, “It’s a lovely friendly space and there are always at least five different homemade cakes available. The volunteers are always keen to chat, and of course there is great coffee!”
The Café is run on a donation only basis; customers can pay whatever they can afford.
“Everyone should be able to be able to treat themselves,” says Julia. “By having it as donation only it means that people can come and have a cake and a couple of cups of coffee and to be honest, no one notices what people give.”
The Café has become a key part of the Harpenden Trust and because it is located at the centre of the Trust premises it has become a focal point for a lot of the Trust’s activities. “Lots of people attending classes or activities in the Trust halls use the Café,
says Julia, “and we have lots of volunteers meeting here as well as members of the public who can pop in.” ☕️💜
The Well Bean Café has also been instrumental in building relationships in the community, as Julia explains, “One of the best things about the Café is that we can see friendships forming over the coffee.
“We’ve seen people meet each other and become
real friends and that is wonderful.” ❤️
The idea for the Well Bean Café sprang from chat between volunteers. “We initially wanted to have a meeting room with a coffee machine, but when we moved to the new premises, we realised that there was a kitchen and an area that we could transform into a Café we decided to go for it,” says Julia.
The transformation saw volunteers rebuilding the kitchen, scouring Hertfordshire for furniture and fittings, and sourcing donations of kit to get things started. “It was quite scary to begin with, says Julia. “Would people come? What would happen? But we
built it up and it is a great success.” 👏
So Happy Birthday Well Bean Café! 🥳 There are about 50 volunteers who support the Well Bean Café in a range of ways, some of whom have been involved from the start. It has become a popular and much-loved part of Harpenden Trust, and we look forward to many more years of coffee and friendship! ☕️🥰✨🎉
