What would we do without psychotropic drugs? You may have given up or indeed may have

never used nicotine, but today caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance

in the world. In the West 80% of adults consume enough caffeine to have an effect on their

brain, but these are two forgotten, chewed and steward innovations. It turns out that we have them

to thank for our addictions. As today's guest tells me.

Dr Matthew Green is the author of London, a travel guide through time, published by Penguin,

and he's working on a book called Shadowlands about Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and

vanished villages, which will be published by Faber in the UK and WWW Norton in North America.

He runs Unreal City Audio, which offers wonderful walking tours of London as live events,

audio downloads and smartphone apps. And it's in this guy's that we met when he was talking

to me about coffee and indeed about tobacco. Matt, we really ought to be sitting in some sort

of dark smoky pub or at least some sort of dark smoky coffee house, shouldn't we?

Yes. Well, either of the two would be fine by me.

But the smoke is long gone. Imagine us there listeners, but actually in practice we're on Zoom.

And we are talking about two psychotropic drugs that we don't necessarily associate with

the tutors and with the stewards, but indeed actually originate there. So let's take

them each in turn. Let's start with the fags. When did Europe first learn of tobacco?

It appears to have been introduced to Europe by the much and adventurer, John Hawkins,

round about 1565. And then it took a while to catch on. But it really did catch on and

triggered this huge tobacco boom, which as far as I can see seems to have been sort of

written out of history. You don't really associate, as you were just saying, with the chewed

period, but from the 1560s right through into Jacobian times London in particular was

...