Cambridge Orchard Tea Garden, UK
Celebrities Have Loved This Quirky Cambridge Tea Place For a Century
© Ja Woolf
The unusual Orchard Tea Gardens just outside the university town of Cambridge has a glittering array of past patrons, ranging from Prince Charles to J G Ballard
A glittering array of celebrities have visited Cambridge’s unpretentious Orchard Tea Garden over the last 100 years or so. They include Wittgenstein and Emma Thompson and A.A.Milne, Stephen Hawking and Virginia Woolf, Pandit Nehru and Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Salman Rushdie, Maynard Kenyes, James Mason, E.M. Forster, Rupert Brooke, and even King George VI. And the list goes on: stars of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the man who invented the jet engine, Prince Charles….
A Popular Tea Place
The Orchard tea-garden is set in the village of Grantchester, two and a half miles outside the university town of Cambridge. It first became a popular tea-place for the university's undergraduates about a hundred years ago. They'd walk through the beautiful meadows along a path nicknamed the “Grantchester Grind” or pole a flat-bottomed punt up the River Cam to buy their tea from a Mrs. Stevens who owned the fruit trees and the adjoining property, known as Orchard House.
The Rupert Brooke Connection
In 1909 the handsome and charismatic young poet, Rupert Brooke, put The Orchard on the map. He lodged with Mrs. Stevens to escape the hectic whirl of Cambridge, but his social life followed him, and soon, Brooke's many friends - many of whom later became the Bloomsbury Group - were regular visitors. Brooke sealed the area's popularity with his poem "Grantchester", which concludes: "Stands the church clock still at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?"
The Orchard became a favorite escape from the town, and a popular place to breakfast after the annual May Balls. It still is. At the right time of year, dawn visitors can still spot undergraduates in tuxedos and formal gowns poling up the little river in their punts, and see them emerge from the morning mists to consume champagne and strawberries at long tables beneath The Orchard's spring blossom.
Careful Preservation
The tea garden’s laid-back Edwardian country charm has been carefully preserved, and it serves good teashop or pub-lunch type food. It is open every day from 9.30 – closing time depends on when it gets dark. Its simple green-painted wooden tables were hand-made to match the original furniture, deckchairs have been rescued from seaside resorts and re-covered in green all-weather fabric. A dirt path winds between shaggy grass, ivy twines around the tree trunks. It’s possible to gather windfall apples in the autumn and when the weather is wet visitors can drink their tea in the same hut that Rupert Brooke and all the other celebrities knew.
