A Short History of Tea in England

Pull up a chair, honey. The history of tea in England is not really a story about a plant. It is a story about a princess with unusual luggage, a tax so greedy it created an entire criminal industry, a duchess who got peckish at four o'clock, and about sixty million people who still cannot start the day without a mug of something strong and milky. I have been drinking tea for fifty years and selling teapots for rather a lot of them, and I never tire of this one.

So let me take you through it properly. Not the tidy version with three dates in it, but the real one, with the smugglers and the ration books and the brown teapot that ended up in every kitchen in the country.

Before the queen: tea in the coffee houses

Here is the part most people get wrong. Tea did not arrive in England in a royal trousseau. It arrived in a coffee house, and it was sold by a merchant called Thomas Garway, who began offering it at his premises in Exchange Alley, just off Lombard Street, in 1657. He sold it both ways: as a dry leaf to take home, and as a brewed drink to sit and sup. The following year, the first newspaper advertisement for tea appeared in a London paper called Mercurius Politicus.

Picture those rooms, because they were nothing like a tea shop. Coffee houses were loud, smoky, male and deeply political. Men went there to argue, to trade shipping news and to gossip about Parliament. Tea sat on the counter as an expensive medical curiosity, recommended for roughly every ailment a seventeenth century Londoner could invent. It was not yet a comfort. It was a tonic with a price tag.

1662: a Portuguese princess and a casket of tea

Then, in 1662, Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. The match was pure statecraft: England wanted money and ports, Portugal wanted protection, and the dowry handed over Bombay and Tangier. What nobody negotiated for was the small casket of tea that came with her.

Catherine had a hard start at the English court. She was Catholic, convent-educated and quietly devout, dropped into a court that was none of those things, and her Portuguese hooped skirts were laughed at. But she was the first lady of the kingdom, and first ladies set fashions whether they mean to or not. She adopted English dress and kept her Portuguese tastes, tea among them. The ladies of the court copied her, then the women who wanted to be mistaken for ladies of the court copied them, and tea completed the single most important move in its English career: it left the coffee house and walked into the drawing room, where the women were.

It stayed expensive for a century. Tea was kept in a caddy with a working lock, and the lady of the house kept the key on her person. Servants were not trusted with it, and you can hardly blame the servants. We think of a good cup as an everyday object now. Back then a tea service was a declaration of income.

Tea gardens, and the golden age of smuggling

The eighteenth century gave tea two things: a public stage and a crime wave.

The stage was the pleasure garden. Places like Vauxhall and Ranelagh sold admission to gravel walks, music and supper boxes, and crucially, a respectable woman could take tea there in public without a word being said about her. Taking tea stopped being something that happened behind a front door.

The crime wave came from the tax. Duty on tea climbed to a genuinely absurd 119 per cent, and the market answered the way markets always do: for much of that century, more tea entered England illegally than legally. Whole stretches of the Cornish and Kentish coast ran on it. The ugly part is what the smugglers sold, because untaxed tea was frequently bulked out with other dried leaves, with spent leaves dried a second time, and with dye to make the fraud look like tea.

It ended in 1784. William Pitt the Younger, advised by the tea merchant Richard Twining, passed the Commutation Act and cut the duty from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Smuggling simply stopped being worth the risk and collapsed almost overnight. Within a generation, tea was no longer the drink of people with locked caddies. It was the drink of absolutely everyone, which is where the English teapot as we know it really begins.

The afternoon that invented a meal

By the 1800s dinner had drifted alarmingly late, to eight o'clock and beyond, while luncheon stayed where it was. That leaves a long, hungry, badly lit gap in the middle of the afternoon, and somebody was going to do something about it.

The somebody, we are told, was Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford. The story goes that around 1840, at Woburn Abbey, she complained of a sinking feeling late in the day and asked for tea, bread and butter and cake to be brought up to her room. Then she started inviting friends. Her friends were courtiers, the Queen heard about it, the Queen approved, and a national institution was born over a tray.

I will be honest with you, as I would about any family legend: historians credit her with it but cannot actually verify a word of the anecdote. What is certainly true is the shape of the thing. The gap in the day was real, the solution was real, and by the 1850s afternoon tea was a dressed occasion with its own etiquette. If you want the full ceremony, I have written out the whole business of putting one on at home, and if you have ever been handed a menu and wondered what you had actually booked, the two are genuinely different meals.

The cake side of it got written down too. The earliest known recipe for the Victoria sandwich appears in Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management in 1861, which is also roughly when the cake stopped being a court curiosity and became the thing you made on a Sunday. I keep my own version of that sponge on hand for exactly this reason.

"At my mother's house it was never called afternoon tea, dear. It was just four o'clock, and you washed your hands before you came in."

Granny Lulu, on the version nobody puts in books

The teapot that ended up in every English kitchen

Every country gets the teapot it deserves, and England got a round brown one. The Brown Betty is thrown from Staffordshire red clay, finished in a dark manganese glaze, and shaped like a slightly overfed pumpkin. It is not elegant. It has never been elegant. It is simply very, very good at making tea, and it has been doing it in English kitchens for generations. I have told the full story of that round brown pot separately, because it deserves its own page.

The Brown Betty also explains a very English invention: the knitted cover. When your pot sits on the table for an hour while three people work through a long conversation, you want the heat kept in, and that is the entire job of a tea cosy. Americans find them funny. The English find them obvious.

Tea on the canvas, and tea on the hoarding

You can track tea's rise in English painting without reading a single history book. Eighteenth century families commissioned group portraits, posed stiffly around the tea equipage: the pot, the kettle, the little cups, the caddy. The tea table was the stage set and the message was unmistakable. Look what we can afford to drink.

Two centuries later it was selling itself on the street. In 1940 the International Tea Market Expansion Board commissioned the artist Leslie MacDonald Gill to make a pictorial world map called Tea Revives the World, which went up as a hoarding twenty feet by ten. It appeared while London was being bombed nightly, and the message was not subtle: your tea is safe, carry on. Few advertisements have ever read the national mood so accurately.

Rationing: when tea mattered more than sugar

Which brings us to the ration book, and to my favourite proof of how seriously this country takes tea.

Tea went on ration in July 1940. The adult allowance was two ounces a week, which works out at roughly three cups a day if you are careful and no cups at all if you are generous with visitors. From July 1942 children under five got none. From December 1944 the over-seventies got extra, which tells you exactly who the government thought would complain loudest. The ration rose to two and a half ounces in August 1952, and tea rationing finally ended on 5 October 1952.

Read that date again. Seven years after the war ended. Tea outlasted most of the other staples on the ration, because it was treated as strategic: sent to munitions factories, carried to the forces, poured out of mobile canteens at bomb sites while the dust was still settling. Nobody was pretending it was nutrition. It was morale, and the government budgeted for it as such.

The great British brew, as it is actually drunk

Here is where I gently disappoint the romantics. The English national drink is not a delicate first flush in a porcelain cup. It is builder's tea: a strong, malty, Assam-heavy blend, brewed dark in a mug, softened with cold milk and often sugared. It takes its name from the people who drink it by the gallon, and it is unapologetically the default.

The finer end never went away, mind. Walter Whittard opened his first shop on Fleet Street in 1886, aged twenty-five, under the straightforward motto Buy the Best, moved to the tea trade's own street at Mincing Lane by 1890, and the business ended up in Chelsea, which is how it got the name people know. And then there is my favourite English tea institution of all, which has no brand at all: the tea tent at a village fair, an urn the size of a dustbin, thick white cups, and a trestle table of cakes made by people who have made that cake four hundred times. If you ever find the thick white cup and the saucer that goes under it charming rather than plain, you have understood English tea completely.

How to serve tea the English way at home

None of this is difficult. It is just a set of habits, and they are good ones.

Warm the pot first. Swill it with hot water from the kettle and tip it out, because a cold pot steals heat from your brew in the first thirty seconds and you never get it back. Fill your kettle with fresh cold water and bring it to a proper rolling boil for black tea, which wants the full 212°F. Use one rounded teaspoon of leaf per cup, plus one for the pot. Brew three to five minutes depending on how strong you take it, then get the leaves out, because tea left sitting on its leaves turns bitter and no amount of milk will rescue it.

Milk first or tea first is the one argument I will not settle for you. The old defence of milk first is that it protected fine china from thermal shock, which is a tidy explanation that may well be a story people told themselves afterwards. Either way the English put milk in strong black tea because it rounds off the astringency of a brisk Assam, and once you have tried it on a proper builder's brew you stop asking why. If you want the full table laid properly, a matched English tea set does most of the work for you.

Frequently asked questions

Who introduced tea to England?+

Nobody person did, which is why the question is slippery. Tea was already being sold in London by the merchant Thomas Garway from 1657. Catherine of Braganza, who married Charles II in 1662, is the name everybody remembers because she brought tea with her from Portugal and made it fashionable at court, and courtly fashion is what carried tea into English homes. So: Garway sold it first, Catherine made it matter.

Why do the English put milk in tea?+

Mostly because of what they drink. The English default is a strong, malty black blend brewed dark, and cold milk softens that briskness into something you can drink six times a day. There is also a long-standing explanation that milk went into the cup first to stop hot tea cracking fine porcelain, which is a neat story, though it is repeated far more often than it is proven. Delicate green, white and oolong teas take no milk at all.

What is the difference between afternoon tea and high tea?+

They are two different meals, and the names mislead almost everyone. Afternoon tea is the dainty one, served at a low table in the middle of the afternoon: sandwiches, scones, small cakes, good cups. High tea is a substantial early-evening meal eaten at a proper dining table, with hot savoury food. If you are picturing tiered stands and fine china, you want afternoon tea.

What tea do the English actually drink every day?+

An Assam-led breakfast blend, brewed strong, in a mug, with milk. It is often called builder's tea. Loose leaf is enjoying a real revival at home, but the everyday national habit is a robust black blend rather than anything delicate, and it is drunk at every hour the day offers.