Tea Time in Glasgow

I wanted to share a visit to a very special place that we made a few weeks ago – the Macintosh At The Willow tea room in central Glasgow.

Within about a week or so that D. arrived to Glasgow in August 2019, I came for a visit to help him settle in. He was staying in temporary furnished housing but still needed little things to round out the kitchen, etc.

On one of our shopping forays downtown, we passed the Mackintosh at the Willow tea room and I immediately knew it was a place I wanted to visit. It looked so interesting from the outside and, as many of you know, I love drinking tea. It looked like a heavenly place to rest, chat and sip.

I’m not sure why, but we managed a visit for the first time recently. We did the full experience – checking out their fantastic exhibit about the tea room’s history, touring of the building and also sitting for a spot of tea in one of the gorgeous rooms. What a treat!

In learning about this one historic tearoom, we got an interesting glimpse into the history of Glasgow.

First, we were reminded how Glasgow’s population had grown in the industrial era. In the early 1800’s, the city had about 77,000 residents and by 1900, the population had grown to over 760,000. The city’s whole makeup and boundaries changed dramatically and it was considered the “Second City of the British Empire” at the time, after London.

During the mid 1850’s, Glasgow was a major center for importing and blending coffee and tea from China and then, from India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Between the 1850’s and 1900, tea consumption tripled to 6 pounds per year per capita.

The very first tea room in Britain was founded in 1875 by the brother of the founder of the Willow Tea Room (original name of Mackintosh At The Willow). The trend for tea rooms developed as a place for “respectable” people to eat out and socialize. It also grew from the Temperance movement, with great concern for having a place that was free from alcohol and its effects.

Tea houses were a boon to women who for the first time had a place to meet socially, though both women and men across all classes visited them. Tea rooms mushroomed in population and, in 1903, the Willow Tea Room was born, founded by Miss Catherine Cranston, an entrepreneurial and visionary woman.

Those of you who have been reading the blog for some time might recall my passion for Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Mackintosh, two wonderful Glaswegian artists from that era. (See my previous post for more details.)

Miss Cranston hired Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the design of the tea room which has a main floor tea room with a balcony lit with a skylight. Upstairs, there was a small room called the Salon de Luxe which was for women only and was decorated in the colors of the suffragette movement. It was a place where women of the day planned their next steps to earn the right to vote in privacy. There was also a billiards room for the men.

Along with selecting a very forward-looking designer for the tea room, Miss Cranston operated her tea rooms (she owned a few) with business-savvy and heart. She chose employees, often women, who were facing tough times and actually tried them out first and trained them in her own home before having them work in one of her establishments. She also provided sick-pay for her employees, which was nearly unheard of then. She also made sure her establishments had offerings for all classes.

When World War I brought rationing, it signaled the slow demise of the Willow Tea Room. It was used for a number of things since then including a department store. Little did we know when we passed it in 2019 that the tearoom had just finished a massive restoration project the year before, returning it its previous glory.

I hope some of you will make it to Glasgow soon and we can enjoy a cup of tea together in this marvelous setting but, until then, I hope you enjoyed this wee step back in Glasgow’s history with a warm tea or coffee in hand. Cheers!