Are the Brits still a nation of tea drinkers? Or is this just another tired cliché? And why have these tiny, curled leaves become so firmly rooted in our culture, infusing our vocabulary with expressions like "tea and sympathy" or "storm in a teacup"? Here's an analysis from a slightly biased Brit.
Tea and celebrity
In 21st-century Britain, have we switched to coffee, fruit drinks, infused waters and smoothies, or is tea still our favourite national beverage?
The singer Adele is a fan. Who could be more British? Take a look at the video of her hit song "Hello", where a freshly brewed cup of tea provides comfort for heartache. Noel Gallagher, part of the music duo that was once Oasis, told the Sun newspaper that he drinks multiple cups each day. Meanwhile, actor Benedict Cumberbatch has made a hilarious YouTube video showing how to make the perfect cuppa (www.spotlight-online.de/tea). And there are plenty more national icons who love their tea.
What about the rest of us? The UK Tea & Infusions Association says Brits consume a whopping 100 million cups of tea each day. But according to the online data-gathering platform Statista, coffee consumption is beginning to overtake tea. In a survey carried out in August 2023, Statista found that 63 per cent of Brits regularly drink coffee, compared with only 59 per cent who regularly drink tea. The prevalence of coffee shops on British high streets was given as one reason for the increased popularity of coffee. The figures quoted here are, of course, not definitive, but it seems as if coffee consumption is gaining ground.
So, will tea drinkers soon become a dwindling minority in Britain? Will Adele soon be sipping a latte in her music videos? Perhaps Noel Gallagher is switching to cappuccinos as you read this. However, the author of this article would argue that the history of tea drinking in Britain goes back so far, and is so culturally significant, that it won't easily be supplanted by coffee.
The beginnings of the brew
Nobody knows who the first tea drinkers were. Some historians believe that prehistoric humans made a type of tea, but it's the Chinese who claim to have first drunk it hot. The leaves of Camellia sinensis were likely already being brewed to make tea in China in the second millennium BC. Legend has it that Emperor Shen Nung discovered tea as a hot drink when leaves from a tea shrub blew into a cup of boiled water that he was drinking.
The beverage reached Europe in the early 17th century. Dutch and Portuguese merchants began to import tea leaves, but the trend was slow to cross the Channel because the British had weak trading ties with China. Garraway's coffee house, in the City of London, was probably one of the first places in England to serve tea, in the 1650s.
Perhaps it's a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, we should thank for our ongoing love affair with tea. When she married Charles II of England in 1662, she introduced this trendy beverage to the ladies of the English court. It's not clear how Catherine liked to take her tea, but we do know that, by the 1730s, the British upper classes had begun drinking tea sweetened with sugar.
Tea and taxes
The tea-drinking habit took a bit longer to filter down to Britain's working classes. Tea leaves were highly taxed - up to 100 per cent at one point in the mid-18th century. Most people simply couldn't afford to drink it. This created a flourishing trade in smuggled tea, but the quality of the illegal product was unreliable. To maximize profits, smugglers would add leaves from other plants and, to create the right colour, the mix might contain sheep dung or poisonous copper carbonate. A major turning point in Britain's trade in tea came in 1784, when Parliament passed the Commutation Act - cutting the tax on tea from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Suddenly, smuggling tea was no longer profitable and the real thing became affordable for everyone.
Until the early 19th century, most of the tea imported to Britain came from China. Although Chinese production was fast and efficient, the British wanted to control this valuable commodity for themselves. They began to set up tea plantations in their colonies, first in India and Ceylon in the 1840s and, later on, in Kenya. In 1848, the British East India Company even sent a Scottish botanist called Robert Fortune to steal tea plants from China and take them to India. His story reads like a James Bond novel.
Back in Britain, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Tea was a contributing factor in its success. Drinking boiled water reduced mortality rates, and when tea was drunk with milk and sugar, it provided calories for hungry factory workers.
By the outbreak of the First World War, tea had become essential to national morale. The British armed forces were given the drink as part of their rations and soldiers would fill their canteens with tea rather than water.
Even after the war, its popularity kept increasing. In 1900, the annual consumption of tea per capita was 5.9 pounds - by 1931, that figure had risen to 9.6 pounds.
Tea and tales
Tea also thoroughly infused another aspect of British life, namely literature. Tea turned up - and continues to turn up - in the works of many authors, from Jane Austen: "Mr Tilney drank tea with us, and I always thought him a great addition" (Northanger Abbey, 1817), to Agatha Christie: "Will you pour out tea, Miss Brent?" The elder woman replied: "No, you do it, dear. That teapot is so heavy" (And Then There Were None, 1939).
English literature is packed with tea drinkers of every age and class. Mrs Corney at the workhouse in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) enjoys a warming cuppa, while Oliver and his friends freeze and go hungry. Alice is sent off to a surreal tea party with the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). More recently, in his crime story A Line to Kill (2021), Anthony Horowitz tucks into a breakfast of "scrambled eggs and bacon, tea and toast".
Perhaps in the end, though, it doesn't matter if we're drinking more or less tea in 21st-century Britain. Enjoying a warm drink is one of life's small luxuries, especially if we do it in company. And that is something that should never go out of fashion.