Tea room

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For tea rooms used in Japanese tea ceremony, see Japanese tea house

A tea room is a variety of café or tea house found particularly in the United Kingdom, but also present in Australia, India, New Zealand, and some other Commonwealth countries. Tea rooms nowadays tend to be small establishments, but in their heyday tea rooms had a widespread and significant place in British social life.

A customer might expect to receive cream tea or Devonshire tea, often served from a china set, and a scone with jam and clotted cream – alternatively a High tea may be served. In Scotland teas are usually served with a variety of scones, pancakes, crumpets and other cakes.

In a related usage, a tea room may be a room set aside in a workplace for workers to relax and (specifically) take refreshment during work-breaks. Traditionally a staff member serving food and beverages in such a tea room would have been called a tea lady.

The Willow Tearooms.

Room de Luxe, The Willow Tearooms.

1 Historical development
2 Alternative meanings or usage
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Historical development

In the 18th century tea was an expensive (and heavily taxed) luxury for the rich, also available in Coffee houses. After doubts and arguments about possible health risks and the suitability of the beverage for "persons of an inferior rank", the increasing reaction to working class drunkenness in the temperance movement led to tea being promoted as an alternative, and from the 1830s many new cafes and coffee houses opened up as a temperance alternative to pubs and inns.

The tea room itself was developed towards the end of the century. In 1878 Catherine Cranston opened the first of what became a chain of Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms in Glasgow, Scotland, providing elegant well designed social venues which for the first time provided for well-to-do women socialising without male company and which proved widely popular. She engaged up and coming designers, becoming a patron of Charles Rennie Mackintosh who designed several interiors, and the complete building of The Willow Tearooms which provided a strikingly modern exterior as well as a series of interesting interior designs. Similar establishments became popular throughout Scotland, but as late as 1901 Glasgow men were remarking on the lack of "tea shops" in London.

However, from the 1880s fine hotels in both the United States and England began to offer tea service in tea rooms and tea courts, and by 1910 they had begun to host afternoon tea dances as dance crazes swept both the U.S. and the UK. Tea rooms were established catering for all classes of British society, most notably the chain set up by J. Lyons and Co. who opened their first teashop in 1894 at 213 Piccadilly, London, and set up a series of tea rooms known as Lyons Corner Houses. Tea rooms of all kinds were widespread in Britain by the 1950s, but in the following decades cafés became more fashionable, and tea rooms became less common. Country tea rooms offering cream teas are still a tourist attraction in many areas, particularly in Devon and Cornwall, and tea rooms can be found in most towns and villages. In Glasgow, The Willow Tearooms have been restored after years of having been absorbed into a department store, and now run a recreation of other Mackintosh interiors in another establishment in Buchanan Street near the site of one of her original tea rooms.

[edit] Alternative meanings or usage

The phrase tearoom is also gay slang referring to a venue where public sex occurs, referring to tea rooms such as Lyons, but also typically a public toilet: T-Room = Toilet Room (see also cottaging or glory hole). Sociologist Laud Humphreys has written a controversial book on this subject titled Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places, (ISBN 0-20-230283-0) which is often referenced in the context of ethics due to his nonstandard research techniques.

Tea room can also refer to a room in a larger home where the woman of the house could entertain her female companions over a cup of tea free from male interference.