Meet
Duane.

I never set out to become Portsmouth's coffee roaster.

If you'd told the younger version of me, growing up in Leigh Park, that one day I'd be roasting speciality coffee in the middle of Portsmouth, supplying some of the city's best independent businesses and teaching other people how to make great coffee, I'd probably have laughed at you.

Coffee wasn't the plan.

In truth, there wasn't really a plan.

There was just a belief that whatever happened to me in life, I would find a way forward.

I'm Duane Bradshaw, founder and head roaster at Broadway Coffee Roasters, and this is the story behind the person roasting your coffee.

Portsmouth made me

I was born in Portsmouth and brought up in Leigh Park.

I wasn't particularly academic at school. I wasn't the kid destined for university with his whole career mapped out in front of him.

But I could work.

I could make things.

And I wasn't afraid of getting my hands dirty.

I went into engineering and became a welder fabricator. It suited me. There was something I loved about taking raw material and turning it into something useful.

Looking back, I think that's probably where the roaster in me started.

I just didn't know it yet.

Fabrication teaches you patience. Precision matters. A couple of millimetres can be the difference between something fitting and something being useless. You learn to understand materials, temperature and process.

Years later, standing in front of a coffee roaster, a lot of that suddenly felt very familiar.

Then I joined the RAF

At 24 I decided I wanted more from myself, so I joined the RAF Regiment as a Gunner.

It was one of the hardest things I'd ever done.

And one of the best.

Military training teaches you things that are difficult to explain unless you've experienced it. Discipline. Resilience. Standards. Working when you're exhausted. Being accountable to the people around you.

Most importantly, it teaches you that your mind will often tell you you're finished long before you actually are.

Unfortunately, my RAF career didn't end how I'd imagined.

I suffered a serious injury during an exercise and was eventually discharged.

Suddenly the future I'd been working towards had disappeared.

So I went back to what I knew.

Engineering.

Starting again

Eventually I took another gamble on myself and started my own welding and fabrication business.

It grew.

I found myself travelling across the UK and into Europe and Scandinavia for work. I'd built something from nothing and for the first time I started understanding what being an entrepreneur really meant.

Then came another lesson.

My workshop was burgled.

The tools and machinery I'd spent years building up were stolen.

For a fabricator, your tools aren't just equipment. They're your livelihood.

So I did what I've learned to do throughout my life.

I started again.

I went back to working in Portsmouth Dockyard and rebuilt.

Then, in 2020, the world stopped.

COVID arrived.

And strangely enough, out of all that uncertainty came the thing that would completely change my life.

Coffee.

Broadway Coffee Roasters

I'd become obsessed with coffee.

Not just drinking it.

Understanding it.

Where it came from. Why one coffee tasted completely different to another. Processing. Extraction. Roasting. Temperature. Time. Development.

The deeper I went, the more fascinated I became.

And I started noticing something.

Portsmouth had some brilliant cafés and incredible independent businesses, but I felt there was room for a coffee roaster that was unmistakably Portsmouth.

Not trying to look like London.

Not pretending to be something it wasn't.

Something creative, slightly rough around the edges, ambitious and proudly local.

So in 2020, Broadway Coffee Roasters was born.

Named after the row of shops we call home in Southsea, The Broadway has stood here since 1903.

I love that.

Something new growing inside something that has been part of Portsmouth for generations.

I didn't want to build another coffee shop

From the beginning, I wanted Broadway to feel different.

Coffee can sometimes take itself far too seriously.

I love the science. I obsess over roasting. I care enormously about quality.

But I never want somebody to walk into Broadway and feel like they need to know the difference between a washed Colombian and an anaerobic natural before they're allowed to order a coffee.

You don't.

You can be completely obsessed with speciality coffee or you can just want a bloody good flat white.

Both are welcome.

That's why Broadway became a mixture of everything I love.

Coffee. Engineering. Art. Music. Portsmouth. People.

Our walls became home to work from artists including My Dog Sighs, Pogo and Fark. The equipment got bigger. The roasting became more sophisticated. We moved towards solar-assisted electric roasting and worked hard to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of what we do.

But the principle stayed exactly the same.

Do things properly.

Then something unexpected happened

People started believing in it.

Customers came back.

Then they brought their friends.

Local businesses asked us to roast their coffee.

Restaurants, cafés and organisations around Portsmouth started serving Broadway.

Our little Southsea coffee company started growing.

And I realised that roasting great coffee wasn't enough anymore.

If somebody was going to put our coffee through their machine and our name behind their bar, I wanted to help them make it brilliantly.

That thinking eventually led to the Broadway Coffee Academy.

Today we don't just sell businesses bags of beans.

We teach.

We train baristas.

We help people understand extraction, milk, grinders and equipment. We help new café owners avoid the mistakes that cost businesses money.

For me, that's one of the parts of Broadway I'm proudest of.

Knowledge shouldn't be guarded.
It should be shared.

I'm still a fabricator really

People sometimes see engineering, the military and coffee as three completely different chapters of my life.

I don't.

They all led here.

Engineering taught me precision and creativity.

The RAF taught me discipline and resilience.

Business taught me how to lose, rebuild and keep moving.

Coffee gave me somewhere to put all of it.

When I'm profiling a roast, I'm still making something.

I'm taking a raw material and using temperature, timing, experience and instinct to transform it.

The tools have changed.

The person using them hasn't.

Why Portsmouth matters so much to me

Broadway could exist somewhere else.

But it wouldn't be Broadway.

This city is part of our identity.

I'm proud when somebody drinks our coffee in a Portsmouth café.

I'm proud when another independent business chooses a local roaster.

I'm proud when someone walks through the Academy doors wanting to learn a new skill.

And I'm incredibly proud when people travel into Portsmouth because they've heard there's something interesting happening with coffee here.

Because I believe independent businesses make cities interesting.

They're the places where people meet their partners, catch up with their mates, take their kids, have meetings, celebrate things, hide from the rain and spend ten quiet minutes on their own before work.

A coffee shop might look like four walls and an espresso machine.

It isn't.
It's part of a community.

And we're nowhere near finished

Broadway started in 2020 with an idea.

Today there's the roastery, the café, the Academy, our wholesale community and an ever-growing group of people who have backed what we're trying to build.

But I still don't feel like I've arrived.

I'm still learning.

Still experimenting.

Still making mistakes.

Still having ridiculous ideas and occasionally convincing everyone around me that we should actually do them.

That's probably never going to change.

Because I've realised that success, for me, isn't reaching some point where everything is finished.

It's being able to look backwards and realise how far you've travelled while still being excited about what's ahead.

I've been knocked down a few times in my life.

I've had careers end unexpectedly.

I've lost things I've worked incredibly hard for.

I've had to start again.

More than once.

And every single time, something eventually grew from it.

Broadway is probably the greatest example of that.

So when you buy a bag of our coffee, drink a flat white in our café, attend one of our courses or serve Broadway in your business, you're supporting far more than a coffee company.

You're supporting our team.

You're supporting the independent businesses we work alongside.

You're supporting the farmers and producers responsible for the coffee in your cup.

And you're helping us prove that something genuinely special can be built right here in Portsmouth.

I'm Duane.

Welder. Former RAF Regiment Gunner. Dad. Business owner. Coffee roaster.

And somehow, after everything that's happened along the way, I think I've finally found what I was supposed to be doing.

Welcome to Broadway.