Meet Duane

Meet Duane

The person behind the beans, the roaster, and the stubborn belief that something genuinely special can be built right here in Portsmouth. From Leigh Park, through welding and the RAF, to a Portsmouth roastery, Duane's story is about making a way forward, then making something useful with both hands.

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 , 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.

I was broke and, to be honest, a little bit defeated.

But a dear friend set up a GoFundMe page, and the local community came together to support me and help put me back on my feet.

The GoFundMe raised around £700. That didn't come close to replacing what I'd lost, but it fed me for the month. It was air. It gave me enough to feed myself, get back out there, work my arse off and start to recover.

I'll never forget that support.

To this day, I've tried to give back. I still don't feel like I've done enough, but I keep trying, because when I was at my lowest, people who didn't have to stepped up and helped me keep going.

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.

 

A second chance

In 2019, I had an experience that changed the way I looked at my life.

It was around four in the morning when I aquaplaned in my Ford Ka. The car left the road, rolled through woodland and landed upside down in a river.

It was dark. I was trapped, and I genuinely believed I might die there.

Fortunately, a RAC driver came across me and rescued me.

What followed was an awakening I still find difficult to explain. I had a dream, or a vision, that said: "We came to you and you did nothing with us : now we have to die together."

I understood it as a message about the ideas, opportunities and possibilities I'd been carrying with me but never acted on. It made me realise that I had been given a second chance.

After that, I didn't want to live in fear of failing. I wanted to pursue the dream I'd held for a long time: opening my own café.

 

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.

But the move from metal worker to coffee roaster didn't happen overnight.

After I was robbed, I started to feel like I was on the wrong track. I could have quit. I could have given up on the ten-year lease I had on my shop and walked away from the whole thing.

Instead, I sat down and wrote a list on a piece of paper. I wrote down what my passions were.

Coffee was one of them.

I'd always enjoyed business, and I'd always enjoyed contributing to the community around me. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that coffee could bring all of those things together.

I also realised something else: there wasn't a single coffee roasting company in Portsmouth.

So I made my move.

I studied. I obsessed. I worked relentlessly and became determined to make it work. I wasn't scared of failing. I was more afraid of not trying.

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.

 

The unsung hero’s

The longer I've done this, the more convinced I've become that no cup of coffee ever belongs to one person.

People might know my name because it's on the front of the story, but the truth is Broadway only works because of a long line of people doing important work, often without much fuss and usually without much credit.

It starts long before the coffee reaches Portsmouth.

Every bag we roast began with farmers and producers making hundreds of decisions most people never get to see. Soil, altitude, picking, processing, drying, storage, all of it matters. Behind every coffee is somebody taking a gamble on weather, price, labour and time, hoping the work of an entire season will hold up in the cup. I think about that a lot when we're roasting. It keeps your feet on the ground.

Then the coffee arrives here, and another group of people become part of the story.

Our roasting team, our café team, the people packing orders, dialling in espresso, serving customers, cleaning down at the end of the day, answering questions and keeping standards where they need to be. A lot of the best work in coffee happens quietly. It's consistency. It's care. It's somebody doing the right thing when no one is clapping for it.

The same goes for the cafés and businesses that trust us with their coffee.

When a wholesale partner puts Broadway on their bar, they aren't just buying beans. They're backing our name, our standards and our way of doing things. And in return, we back them. I care massively about that relationship because independent businesses survive by looking after each other properly. Especially in a city like Portsmouth, where people can tell when something is real and when it isn't.

The Academy comes from that same belief.

I've never liked the idea of knowledge being treated like a secret handshake. The trainers, baristas and café owners who keep learning, keep practising and keep asking better questions are part of what lifts the whole standard of coffee in this city. If someone makes a better cup because of something we've shared, that's a win for all of us.

And then there are the customers.

The regulars. The people who buy a bag for home. The ones who book a course, tell a mate about us, bring family in, or choose to spend their money with an independent instead of somewhere easier and more convenient. That support matters more than people probably realise. In a world full of chains and shortcuts, choosing local is no small thing.

So when people talk about Broadway, I don't really think about it as my story on its own anymore.

I think about the producers at origin, the team here in Southsea, the cafés serving our coffee across the city, the baristas trying to get better at their craft, and the customers who make room for all of us to keep going.

They're the unsung heroes really.

And if Broadway has done anything worth being proud of, it's because all of those people are in it with us.

 

Kevin and Toby

There are two people I need to thank properly, because without Kevin Steer and Toby Woodfine, Broadway Coffee Roasters simply wouldn't have been possible.

When you're building something from the ground up, you quickly learn that belief is just as important as money, equipment or a good idea. Kevin and Toby believed in what we were trying to create, and they played a huge part in helping Broadway become real.

They gave their time, their energy and their support when there was no guarantee that any of it would work. They stood alongside me while the idea took shape, helped turn conversations into plans and plans into something people could actually see, touch and be part of.

Broadway might carry my name on the story, but it was never built by one person. Kevin and Toby were there at a point when this was still an idea with plenty of risk attached to it. Their contribution helped give us the foundation to move forward, and I'll always be grateful for that.

A lot of people see the finished roastery, the café, the coffee and the community around it. They don't always see the people who helped make the first steps possible.

Kevin and Toby are two of those people.

So this is me saying thank you properly. For believing in Broadway, for helping create it and for being part of the reason we're here today.

Without them, none of this would have been possible.

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, Soak, 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.

Duane Bradshaw
Founder & Head Coffee Roaster
Broadway Coffee Roasters
Portsmouth