Why is everything about our coffee culture so Italian?

So, first off, it's definitely not EVERYTHING about our coffee culture that is Italian. Instant coffee made at home is a big part of UK coffee culture, and there's nothing particularly Italian about that. It's only the out-of-home part that is. Based on a little casual research just now: I don't think the "first wave" of coffee culture in the UK being mentioned by others, centuries ago, is at all relevant. That had more or less completely died out by WW2; so few people were drinking coffee at that time that it wasn't rationed, while tea was rationed until 1952. So we can take the 1940s as a reset point for UK coffee culture: the Italian-esque culture we have now definitely arrived after then. The tea rationing is probably quite important here: post-war Britain would have been feeling the difficulty of getting tea, and looking for alternatives. Then the answer nobody else has given yet: **Italian emigration after WW2**. We know that happened; famously to the Eastern USA in huge numbers. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italians_in_the_United_Kingdom?wprov=sfla1) suggests there was also a little, brief spike in Italian immigration to the UK in the 1950s. It didn't have to be huge: I suspect that a shortage of tea, abundance of coffee, and presence of recent immigrants with a strong coffee culture were the critical elements. There might also have been immigrants from other countries with coffee cultures, creating demand - at that point it just became a race of who would step into the economic gap first (and start opening coffee shops). And it appears that was Italians. Perhaps it was one of those "knife edge" history things - maybe 1950s-60s London had as many North African coffee shops as Italian ones, and it's just a question of what won out? I am speculating here! (Sadly, racism would probably explain why that was, if it was indeed so.) Relevant data point: Costa coffee was founded by [Italian brothers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Costa_%28businessman%29?wprov=sfla1) who immigrated to the UK as kids in 1959, and whose parents brought a coffee bean roaster with them. That suggests the parents might have been in the coffee business back home too. They were a roaster only for the first decade of the company, supplying other coffee shops. They started opening shops in 1981, before the other big coffee chains came to the UK. (Starbucks was a decade old in the USA then, but not in the UK. Maybe the Costa Bros were inspired by Starbucks, maybe not.)