Welcome to the liveliest of coffee houses — online

A warm invitation to The Spectator’s new website

The Spectator has a new website — redesigned, easier to use, with new features and writers. The online magazine will continue to do what the print magazine has always done on paper: inspire debate, stir up controversy and have some fun, with the added advantage that you can add your thoughts to ours.

In expanding our web presence we are being true to the traditions of the magazine. The original Spectator of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele arose from the free-wheeling intellectual sparring of the 18th-century coffee house, and if there’s a modern version of this — a space where people can comment and squabble about the issues of the day — it’s surely online. Steele wrote of his own favoured coffee house that it was an intellectual haven where someone ‘of your temper is in his element’, a ‘place of rendezvous to all that live near it’.