This episode of Scran is all about Scotland's historical relationship with tea and more specifically the rise and fall of the great Glasgow tea rooms.
Rosalind is joined by Dr Lindsey Middleton, Food Historian and Knowledge Exchange Associate at the University of Glasgow and friend of the podcast Peter Gilchrist, who is a Scottish food history writer. Lindsey and Peter organised the 2025 Scottish Food History Symposium on tea which took place recently and was delivered in partnership with Mackintosh at the Willow and the National Trust for Scotland.
Roaslind went along to the tea Symposium at Mackintosh at the Willow in Glasgow. There she learnt how tea in Glasgow was linked to women, trade and slavery, art, class, tourism, Scottish identity, and diaspora. The event was truly fascinating and shared the rich history of Glaswegian tearooms.
You'll hear from Perilla Kinchin, Author of Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms - talking about Kate Cranston, the first lady of Glasgow's tea rooms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
You'll also hear snippets from Professor Andrew Mackillop's talk on some of the earliest presence of tea in Glasgow and how it became surprisingly political.
Rosalind is joined by Dr Lindsey Middleton, Food Historian and Knowledge Exchange Associate at the University of Glasgow and friend of the podcast Peter Gilchrist, who is a Scottish food history writer. Lindsey and Peter organised the 2025 Scottish Food History Symposium on tea which took place recently and was delivered in partnership with Mackintosh at the Willow and the National Trust for Scotland.
Roaslind went along to the tea Symposium at Mackintosh at the Willow in Glasgow. There she learnt how tea in Glasgow was linked to women, trade and slavery, art, class, tourism, Scottish identity, and diaspora. The event was truly fascinating and shared the rich history of Glaswegian tearooms.
You'll hear from Perilla Kinchin, Author of Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms - talking about Kate Cranston, the first lady of Glasgow's tea rooms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
You'll also hear snippets from Professor Andrew Mackillop's talk on some of the earliest presence of tea in Glasgow and how it became surprisingly political.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Glasgow in truth is a very Tokyo for tea rooms. Nowhere can one have so much for so little,
00:16nowhere are such places more popular and frequented. So wrote J.H. Muir, who was in
00:25fact three bright young men hiding beneath a pseudonym, in Glasgow in 1901, a little book
00:32introducing the city to the torrent of visitors coming to its second great international exhibition.
00:41They identified what was by then a distinct phenomenon produced by the entrepreneurial
00:47openness to opportunity that distinguished Glasgow at its height. The tea rooms became embedded into
00:54city life in a very particular way. Glaswegians loved them for their cheapness, their high standards
01:01and their convenience. And this thriving unstuffy business city was the same Glasgow that produced
01:10a distinctive local flowering of art and design in the later 19th century. And Miss Cranston's
01:17flair was to combine all this into something truly special. So the beginnings were shaped
01:24by the Cranston's brother and sister. It's the redoubtable Kate, Catherine Kate, who has become
01:32well known again, eagerly taken up of course as a woman who can be written back into history
01:39and appreciated for her crucially important role in the career of Glasgow's now acknowledged architectural
01:46genius, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. She was in many ways inimitable, but she was imitated and by countless
01:56others. In Glasgow and beyond, tea rooms multiplied in the last two decades of the 19th century. And then in the
02:05the Edwardian years, slightly more slowly and went on developing long after Miss Cranston withdrew from
02:13business, dominated in the 1920s and 30s by the super tea rooms of Glasgow's great family baking firms.
02:22They were only really finished off after the Second World War, along with so much of Glasgow's economy.
02:31Hello and welcome to Scran, the podcast passionate about the Scottish food and drink scene.
02:35I'm your host, Rosalind Erskine, and you just heard from Perilla Kinchin, author of Taking Tea with
02:40Mackintosh, the story of Miss Cranston's tea rooms, talking about Kate Cranston, the first lady of
02:46Glasgow's tea rooms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was taken from the 2025 Scottish
02:53Food History Symposium on Tea, which took place recently and was delivered in partnership with
02:58Mackintosh at the Willow and the National Trust for Scotland. On this episode of Scran, we're exploring
03:03Scotland's relationship with tea and specifically the rise of the tea rooms in Glasgow. I am joined
03:09by Dr Lindsay Middleton, Food Historian and Knowledge Exchange Associate at the University of Glasgow
03:14and friend of the podcast, Peter Gilchrist, who's a Scottish food history writer. Lindsay and Peter
03:21organised and hosted the tea symposium, which I went along to at Mackintosh at the Willow in Glasgow.
03:26There, I learnt how tea in Glasgow was linked to women, trade and slavery, art, class, tourism,
03:32Scottish identity and the diaspora. The event was truly fascinating and shared the rich history of
03:39Glaswegian tea rooms. You'll hear snippets from some of the sessions that were run at the event,
03:44including Professor Andrew McKillop's talk on some of the earliest presence of tea in Glasgow
03:48and how it became surprisingly political. You all know yourselves that food is hugely
03:55political. Drink is hugely political. The questions of whether it's good for a society or bad for a
04:00society, we're going to hear about sugar in any number of different ways. What's the morality behind
04:04its production? What's the morality behind its consumption? You'll also hear more from Perella
04:10Kinchin. She shared some wonderful insight into the visionary entrepreneur and patron of modern design
04:15and architecture, Kate Cranston. Peter, Lindsay, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Peter,
04:25welcome back. I think you're the guest we've had on the most. Am I? Yeah, congratulations. A moniker
04:30I wear with prize. So we've just finished up your tea symposium, which is at the Mackintosh at the
04:35Willow in Glasgow this afternoon. We've been here all afternoon, but it's been going on since this
04:40morning. Absolutely fascinating. Can you just tell us a little bit about how this all came about and
04:46why? So this is our second annual Scottish Food Heritage Symposium. This year's subject has been
04:52tea because we partnered with Mackintosh at the Willow. And these came out of a network of food
04:57researchers and partners that I help run at the University of Glasgow College of Arts and Humanities
05:03called our Food Catalyst. And the sort of original aim of that was to bring people together, working
05:09in the space, try and work out our shared challenges and how we might form new collaborations and projects
05:14to solve them. So we wanted to do more around events that would help us celebrate and platform
05:20Scottish food heritage. And the last event that we ran together, Peter and I went really, really well.
05:26And this year we thought we'd partner with Mackintosh at the Willow, just given how integral a
05:30subject tea is to our day-to-day lives. And the fact that we have this really interesting history
05:35in Glasgow in this beautiful building. So that's how the kind of tea topic came around. And we've
05:40spent the day exploring tea rooms, tea history, the history of sugar. It's been a really interesting
05:45overall event. I've learned so much. One of the catalysts when we were breaking up into tables and
05:51trying to have a discussion about what is missing from like the Scottish food scene. And we were talking
05:57about we need more opportunities for us to talk to people and to meet as collectives in a very
06:02selfish way. We want more jobs and we want to find other people that are as passionate about
06:07Scottish food as ourselves. And Lindsay helped to kind of pull people together. We found funding
06:13last year, it went really well. We found funding this year from Scotland Food and Drinks Regional
06:16Food Fund. And that has allowed us to kind of form this partnership this year with Mackintosh
06:20at the Willow. And again, I think what we're talking about here is a breadth of Scottish food
06:24history. We've got everything from like Japanese tea ceremonies to the Scottish Women's Rural
06:30Institute and kukuri book history. There's so much in there. And it's kind of, this can
06:35only happen when you get a day like this, where people can come in and talk about what they're
06:39passionate about. Obviously, Scottish food history is incredibly broad and we would like
06:44to just continue exploring various aspects. Just keep plugging away. Exactly, exactly.
06:48Yeah, because it's so much more than the sort of stereotypical, I mean, I was saying before
06:52we set up in here that it's interesting to see Glasgow through the lines of the tea room,
06:56like it was good quality food. It was quite cheap. There was none of the stereotypical
06:59stuff we see now.
07:03Here's Professor Andrew McKillop taking us back a few hundred years to the early days of Scotland's
07:07love affair with tea.
07:08By the 1740s, 50s, the English East India Company can tell Scotland is not drinking tea in anything
07:20like the amount you would expect, except it is. It's just not drinking their tea. What
07:25it's doing is it's bringing it in across the North Sea. And we get an idea, a brilliant moment
07:31in time where the British state begins to recognise the scale of the problem. In 1785, Henry Dundas,
07:38the political manager of Scotland at the time, sends actually a guy from what is now Garski
07:42of the state, the Lord Advocate, Isla Campbell of Succoth family. He says, we need to find out
07:49why we're getting no tax returns from tea in Scotland. We know everybody's consuming it.
07:53Why is there no tax returns? The result is, interestingly, he sends Campbell off on a QT
07:59mission to visit the Hellfire Clubs. I'm afraid that's a gentle word for the sex clubs of Leith
08:06and Glasgow to speak to the major smugglers to find out what it is that's going on. Their
08:14argument is it's too heavily taxed. It's an insult to Scotland to have to take tea from
08:19an English London-based monopoly. So they throw in a bit of Scottish patriotism, just for
08:23the roots. And most importantly, they say it's just terrible tea. Swedish tea is brilliant
08:28and that's what Scots are used to. The scale of that smuggling is such that Campbell finds
08:32out that large swathes of Northern England are drinking Swedish tea imported by Scots.
08:38Most of North Ireland is drinking Swedish tea. There's a wave of Kongu tea that's supplied
08:45by Scotland and almost no East India Company tea is being drunk. To give you an idea of how
08:50much it is, Campbell is able to discover that in Glasgow alone in 1785, something like over
08:56330 pounds of tea a day is being drunk. In other words, 49 tonnes of tea per year in what's
09:04still a relatively small town. In other words, tea comes in, but it's not that later version
09:10of a British Empire or an Imperial British one. It comes in through Northern Europe because
09:16Scotland, of course, is part of Northern European society. So that, however, does not mean that
09:24that doesn't produce a good expect cultural reaction and interaction. You all know yourselves
09:30that food is hugely political. Drink is hugely political. The questions of whether it's good
09:35for a society or bad for a society, we're going to hear about sugar in any number of different
09:39ways. What's the morality behind its production? What's the morality behind its consumption? And Scots
09:44are drinking tea in huge amounts, but there is a ferocious counter-reaction to it. I'm going
09:51to use the example from the Scots magazine from 1744 of the good 10 and 3 of Brisbane, who basically
09:56write in terms that they're basically going, this is a morally corrupt foreign commodity which
10:03we are not going to touch. Note the gender dimension, right? Tea is seen as feminine and
10:09defeminising. And good, strong, hardy Scottish farmers aren't going to touch it with a barge
10:15pole, right?
10:16Now what's really interesting is every single borough in Scotland, including Glasgow, sign
10:21up to that resolution. You're not going to believe what the response to or their suggestion
10:27of how you deal with this. He said, we've got to encourage everybody to drink much more
10:32alcohol. We've got to make sure that they're drinking strong beer because that uses up crops
10:39and barley. I can't believe this. We've really got to encourage them to start doing home distilling
10:45for hard spirits. So in the 1740s, the answer is less tea, more alcohol. Brilliant. Now when
10:54you think about it, one of the major forms of Glasgow borough income is the one penny tax
10:59on each pint of beer drunk. So tea is attacking Glasgow's fiscal base. Glasgow is one of the
11:06boroughs that comes storming out, wanting the tax on tea. But over the 18th century, people
11:13are beginning to take a different view of it. So when you look at someone like Godfrey
11:17McCallum, a surgeon from Greenock, writes a very important treatise on the sort of properties
11:22of tea. He's basically beginning to get people to go, no, tea's good, keeps people sober, keeps
11:28them sort of compass mentis. And he goes, and he makes an interesting point. He says, the
11:33kind of tea that's drunk in Scotland is the strong, dark, Congo-type teas from Sweden, and
11:39it fits the constitution of the Scots. They like this sort of stronger, heavier tea, because
11:45as he says, they've got kind of water that they think can handle it. And look what he says
11:50about Scots. Basically, they'll treat their own bodies in a sort of harder way. They're not
11:56so much worried about their organs. So they're basically coming up with stereotypes that Scots
12:02will drink a certain type of dark tea, while the rather more sort of sophisticated, subtle
12:08English will drink a sort of lighter tea down south. In other words, you're getting a sort
12:13of modification of the idea that actually Scottish society is comfortable with tea, and it does
12:18have beneficial effects. And that's kind of really coming into force increasingly from
12:24the mid to later 18th century.
12:25So we've heard a few sessions this afternoon about Glasgow's complicated relationship with
12:32tea. So do you want to tell me a little bit more about that?
12:33Yeah, so a number of our sessions today have sort of delved into when tea began to be imported
12:40into Scotland and into Glasgow. And obviously Glasgow was the second city of empire. So it was
12:45a very key player in the sort of trade of things like tea and sugar. And one of the things that
12:51was touched upon was Glasgow in particular being a kind of powerhouse when it came to
12:56trading things like tea and sugar because of our boat building culture. So we were building
13:01ships, the tea clippers, and we were kind of at the forefront of that as an innovation as
13:07a transport system that allowed tea to be brought into Scotland at a sort of large volume. We also
13:14heard about tea smuggling, about how tea was contentious because after the union with England
13:20in 1707, we lost the ability to trade tea legally. There was a monopoly enforced by the British
13:28East India Company. They wanted to operate solely out of London, and Scottish merchants weren't
13:33overly happy with that because it was a massive economic thing to be losing out on. So we instead
13:39began trading with the Swedish East India Company, and that basically started a whole illicit tea
13:45culture in Scotland where it was smuggled into the country all over different, you know, ports
13:49from tiny, tiny towns right up to the big cities. That was quite a contentious thing because
13:55it was a missed tax opportunity for people who wanted to collect tax, but also Scottish people
14:01wanted to drink tea, import tea as a kind of political statement against England having the monopoly
14:07on trade. So there are all sorts of layers in which this is political. The talks are really
14:12interesting at showing how that changes over time, like tea can symbolise different political
14:16moments depending on where you're looking. Very similar with sugar and slavery and abolition
14:22and how that gets kind of battened about as a kind of a part of politics. It's not just
14:28about the product itself, it's about everything that it symbolises. And the powers that are kind
14:33of batting it back and forth to suit their own agendas. So it's been really interesting
14:38to see how that history was very contested at different points.
14:42Here's Professor Andrew McKillop again talking about the politics of tea in some more detail.
14:50Apologies for some noise coming from a very busy Sookie Holstreet in the background.
14:57Tea, because of the nature of it's a natural product, you need to move it quickly if you
15:01want it to have the efficacious effects you want it to do. It's got all that idea of becoming
15:07associated with speed, of movement, of, in a sense, something which exemplifies the new
15:15interconnected world, because you need to get the first crop over as quick as you can. So
15:20the result is you get, you know, the high prestige ships that run this commodity, particularly
15:26in the second half of the 19th century. Glasgow, and in fact Scotland, next to the eastern
15:34zebra of the United States, absolutely leads the world in the construction of those ships.
15:40American Clippers and Scottish Clippers are the fastest. And in a sense, the two poster
15:47boy girls of the Clipper era, of course, is the Cutty Sark and the Thermopylae. They're
15:54both Scottish built ships, one in Aberdeen and the Cutty Sark, of course, not in Glasgow, but
16:00in part of the emerging Clyde-based systems of. That's a hugely prestigious floating statement
16:06of Glasgow and its shipbuilding sitting at the very cutting edge, quite literally, of one
16:12of the world's great global commodities. Tea was political in the 17th and 18th century,
16:18and it remains a lethally political product, right? And still, it's one of the ways, it's
16:24a lodestone for Scotland's unhappiness at the monopoly of the English East India Company,
16:30a London-based organisation at which, under the terms of the Union, insisted upon the
16:36liquidation of Scotland's company, and in return, Scotland did not get access to Asia. One
16:41of the big myths of the 1707 Union is that Scotland gets access to Britain's empire. It
16:47doesn't. It gets access to half the empire. The English East India Company keeps control
16:52of one whole half of world trade, and Scotland, Scottish society, hates that because it sees
16:57it as a denial of its Britishness. So what we start to see happen in 17, 13, 12 and 13,
17:04and then again in 1829 through 33, is the formation of very powerful Glasgow-based East India
17:11associations, which are lobbying for the destruction of the company's monopoly. And the two most effective
17:18and powerful cities that do these are Liverpool and Glasgow. Leeds and lots of other cities
17:25are involved, but the two big guns that go for the company's monopoly, first of all in the India
17:31trade, are Glasgow and Liverpool. Now when you look at the membership of the Glasgow East India Company
17:38Association, it is noticeable. It is all the West India merchants, right? So sugar is also crucial
17:45to the way Glasgow is lobbying for greater access to tea. That's why there's a huge connection between
17:52sugar and tea. It's sugar and cotton interests which are bringing Glasgow's political weight to bear
17:57against the East India Company in alliance with Liverpool. They do the same again in 1829, not just to get access
18:03to the India trades, but to finally smash open free trade to China. And the result is,
18:10from 34 through 35, Edinburgh actually, as John was saying, gets in there first, but Glasgow's sending out
18:16ships rapidly thereafter. All of that means that in the end, what you have is a story of a sort of
18:23massive tea culture that's there unofficially for a long time before we get the official type story we
18:30understand. But it's also lethally political. You think of tea as cozy, warming and nice.
18:36It's just as political as a Tesla or anything else is today, right? It could be that you're cocking a
18:42snoot at the British state as Campbell was as a Jacobite and a rejection of the East India Company's
18:48authority. Or even in the 1820s to get rid of its monopoly of access to China. And Glasgow as a big
18:56provincial port is at the heart of that political story. Thank you very much.
19:04At what point did it sort of go from the merchants and sort of trade into
19:09like people's jobs and like kind of what we saw more modernly, which is the advent of the tea room?
19:14Yeah, I mean, at the beginning of the 19th century, so we're talking about the 1800s here,
19:18we see tea merchants setting up in Glasgow. And at a tea shop, you can go in and you can request a sample.
19:25And then sometimes you might also be able to have a cake. And that was Stuart Cranston. He was
19:29Kate Cranston's brother. He had a tea shop. You could go in, try some tea, have a wee slice of
19:36something. His sister, Kate Cranston, saw the potential and thought, I'm going to set up a
19:41tea room where we will serve tea. People can come in and they can socialise. At that time, it was very
19:47difficult for women to meet together outside of the home. It was improper for women to be without
19:53their husbands or without a male escort. So what we see is this kind of revolutionary idea that
19:58starts in the middle of the Victorian era, in the middle of the 1800s. And it catches fire in Glasgow.
20:06And then suddenly other cities begin to follow. Glasgow begins to have this entire tea room
20:10culture that's employing both merchants, waitresses, women are getting jobs, people can leave the home.
20:17It changes the landscape of society. And not in a small way, because very soon after Glasgow
20:25develops its tea room culture, Manchester, London, Liverpool, big cities begin to realise the value
20:32in tea rooms and invests in them. Entrepreneurs copy the model that was developed right here in Glasgow.
20:38Here's Prilla Kinshan again.
20:44Whatever the entrepreneurial flair of the Cranstons, their businesses would not have taken root and been
20:51so quickly imitated if they did not perfectly meet the felt needs of the time. And these were
21:00essentially the separate needs of men and of women in a society strongly influenced by the temperance
21:07movement. Temperance coffee rooms and refreshment rooms were clear forerunners of the tea rooms in
21:14respectability. Both Cranstons were practical abstainers, but temperance was never an issue in the
21:21presentation of the tea rooms, which traded simply on the excellence of their offer. And thanks to the
21:28tasteful feminine quality developed by Miss Cranston and her followers, they shook off that suspicion of
21:36doerness which attached to the more evangelical temperance establishments. The primary demand
21:44identified by Miss Cranston, as we've seen, was from men. The businessman's morning break for coffee and
21:52smoke and gossip was held to be an important tool of wealth creation. With their men-only smoking rooms,
22:00the tea rooms met this need. And then with Glasgow growing ever westwards, men couldn't get home for
22:07lunch as in the old days. There was an honor system of payment, that is you ate ad lib, did some mental
22:16arithmetic and paid. And this was something universally adopted by the tea rooms. You notice that they also
22:24stood and kept their hats on to support the impression they weren't really stopping for lunch.
22:31Other places for midday refreshment, chop houses, taverns, pie shops, restaurants, but they served
22:38alcohol. Men under pressure from their women folk to moderate their drinking, or young clerks just
22:45counting their pennies, gladly sat down in a tea room for a cheap and well-cooked lunch. The needs of
22:52women were the crucial new element of demand, as Cranston saw, advertising to them as customers for
22:59his loose tea. After being housebound in earlier Victorian days, they were eager to get out and
23:07about more, and shopping became a key leisure activity with the growth from the 1880s of the new department
23:14stores. Tea rooms, most offering restrooms, were useful ports of call, especially for lunch and
23:23afternoon tea. Importantly, they were respectably accessible without a male escort, because even the
23:32smallest premises tried to provide the safe space of a dedicated ladies room. So the 1890s, the decade of the
23:41new, saw a great leap forward in the city in many respects, and tea rooms multiplied. In 1895, the
23:49evening news wrote, a decade ago, the tea rooms of the city could be counted on one's fingers. Now their name
23:57is Legion. Like other papers, they were picking up on a noticeable social phenomenon of the time.
24:03Vegetarianism and women's bicycling also made frequent copy.
24:10We're in McIntosh at the Willow now. If we were to walk in here and it's heyday, what would we have
24:15been met with? I think the thing particularly about Kate Cranston's tea rooms, and she had multiple
24:20around Glasgow, as we heard earlier, was the fact that she had very high quality in mind all the time.
24:27So not just in terms of food, but also in terms of the decor. And she initially worked with a
24:33different artist before she started working with McIntosh. But what I found was really interesting
24:37was the fact that she frequently took chances on like the kind of newer or lesser known artists.
24:44She seemed to be quite a risk taker in terms of one, the kind of very specific styles in which she
24:50decorated her tea room. And two, the fact that she was happy to like basically hand over control to these
24:55designers, artists that hadn't really cut their teeth yet. There was different kind of spaces
24:59within the tea rooms. There would have been billiard rooms that were for men with billiard
25:04tables. And then there would have typically been a salon or a lounge for women only. And then there
25:09were also spaces that were mixed. So one of the things that's really interesting about the tea
25:13rooms in Glasgow is that you could have paid more if you were here at the Willow, for instance,
25:17to sit in the Salon Deluxe, which was a very sort of beautiful room, kind of height of luxury within
25:23the tea room. But they were also spaces for everyone. And you paid on a kind of honor system
25:29where you judged what you'd eaten and then you paid. So you could come if you didn't have a huge
25:33amount of money, you wouldn't have been served in any different way. The waitresses also were always
25:39beautifully dressed, you know, it was part of a whole experience no matter who you were. And I think
25:44that's really interesting. And I really loved hearing today about how Kate establishes that
25:50relationship with Macintosh as a very young new artist. And she was probably arguably his foremost
25:57patron and, you know, she gave him artistic free reign on multiple properties and also like the menus.
26:02His fiancé and wife was also involved in the art. And she kind of gives this designer a platform which
26:10is probably integral to him then becoming like world renowned because, you know, now people probably
26:15associate the Willow far more with Macintosh than they do with Kate, similarly with Glasgow.
26:20People know Charles Ranney and Macintosh, its designs. We saw today there was loads of like
26:25knockoffs, both in terms of tea rooms and also tea rooms in that particular style.
26:30So it became a kind of cultural movement of its own. And that was a really interesting thing for me to
26:35see how this woman just kind of making a decision to take a chance on this artist basically created
26:41one of Glasgow's and Scotland's icons. And, you know, the rise of tea rooms in Glasgow was inextricable
26:49from the temperance movement that was trying to move people away from drinking alcohol and towards
26:53other things. And a huge part of that was the fact that a lot of the social spaces in the city
26:58were pubs or, you know, places that you could go and you could have a drink with your lunch or,
27:03you know, it was part of the socializing that we were all used to. So tea rooms offered an alternative
27:10and Kate, she was, you know, part of the temperance movement. She abstained from alcohol.
27:15That wasn't like you come into the tea room because you're abstaining. That wasn't the selling point.
27:19The selling point was you can come and have a beautiful experience somewhere, have a social experience,
27:24and booze just isn't involved. So she managed to hit the kind of right time of the temperance movement
27:31taking hold across Scotland, but also sold it in a way that it wasn't too on the nose. You know,
27:37you wouldn't have felt like you were coming to a tea room because you were trying to abstain from
27:41drinking a pint. It was actually like, oh, I'm going to the tea room to have a lovely experience.
27:45And because it was tied in with to this wider cultural movement to try and stop people from
27:50drinking as much, there was more incentive for people to go.
27:58Four floors with the kitchen in the basement, housing a suite of lunch and tea rooms,
28:06including a billiard room for the men. The revealed building was in fashionable historicist style. It was
28:13inside that there was something dazzlingly new. Miss Cranston had handed all the decor and furnishing
28:20right down to the cutlery to George Walton, except for some wall decoration on three floors,
28:29for which she tried out the new art weirdry, to use a journalist phrase, of Charles Rennie McIntosh.
28:36And this establishment, which became her HQ, shot Miss Cranston's tea rooms to
28:45sight of the city status when they opened in 1897. The English architect Edwin Lutyens captured this
28:53perfectly, writing home to his fiancee that he was taken along to a Miss Somebody's who is really a
29:01Mrs. Somebody else. It's all very elaborately simple on very new school high art lines.
29:09The result is gorgeous and a wee bit vulgar. She has nothing but green-handled knives and all is
29:16curiously painted and coloured. Visiting again the next year, he went straight from the station to these
29:23queer funny rooms and recorded his most excellent breakfast, tea, butter, jam, toasts, baps and buns,
29:32two sausages, two eggs, speak it not in gath, all for one and a penny. So clean, most beautiful
29:41peonies on the breakfast table, and the china the same as ours. He then describes her as a dark,
29:48busy, fat wee body with black, sparky, humorous eyes. And ends, so I am much amused and greatly
29:58entertained. The food etc. at a third the cost and three times better than the ordinary hotel,
30:07and the surroundings full of space for fancy and amusement. So Lutyens puts his finger on the elements
30:16of Miss Cranston's success. Beyond the engaging avant-garde decor, which was covered in the studio,
30:24Britain's leading art magazine, her offer was built on reliable quality and good value for money.
30:32From this point on, all Miss Cranston's major work came to Macintosh. She was simply his best and most
30:40loyal patron over the next years through thick and thin. She evidently responded to Macintosh's
30:49perfectionism, and they developed a relationship of trust. She gave him a pretty free hand, enormously
30:57important for his development, and seemed not to quibble at overrunning costs. Total control suited him.
31:05The tea room, unlike a domestic interior, would be kept just as he conceived it. He gave her that
31:12something extra, that over-the-top quality which made the tea room experience something exciting
31:20and special. By the mid-1950s, countless social and economic changes had undermined the viability of
31:30the old tea rooms. Overheads, above all, the lifting of the taboo on alcohol, the lapse of men's coffee
31:38out of the office habit, middle-class women now labouring as housewives. There was a general
31:44admiration for the new and disregard of the old. Coffee became more popular than tea. Tablecloths gave
31:52way to Formica. The local bakeries were hoovered up by conglomerates. Foreign exoticism was the preferred
32:01style for eating places. The Greek Cypriot Riostakis came to town. He bought up some tea rooms and turned
32:11them into steak houses, all licensed, and decorated in contemporary style, which was of course external to
32:19Glasgow. Like Miss Cranston, he succeeded by giving people what they wanted. He too could claim to
32:27have revolutionised Scottish catering. At the closing of Cranston's premises in Queen Street in 1954, there
32:36was a slight awareness of their significance. We've often heard the claim made that this was the original
32:43tea room from which all other tea rooms in the country have derived. Certainly, it was always a pleasant
32:50reminder that this was one of Great Britain's many institutions which have had their beginnings in Victorian
32:58Glasgow, wrote the Journal of the Chamber of Commerce. Cranston's went into liquidation in 1955. Miss Cranston's
33:09Ingram Street premises were bought by the corporation under pressure in 1950 but not looked after. In 1971,
33:19the building was ironically enough sold to Stuckis, but not before, thankfully, a few knowledgeable people
33:27were able to dismantle and store the battered remains of the interiors. But in the mid-1970s came the first
33:35signs of a turning of a turning of the tide, a feeling that destruction and loss had gone too far.
33:42The Macintosh Society was founded in 1973, here I believe. In 1974, thank you.
33:52The Macintosh Society, thank you.
33:56The Macintosh Society, as people recalled, with warmth, Glasgow's heyday and something very special. Thank you.
34:05It's really interesting, we touched on this earlier, how it was really good quality, cheap,
34:16a way to get like a good quality, cheap breakfast, lunch and high tea. And I mean, this is probably
34:22a bit of a daft question because they still exist now, like we're sitting in the willow. But a lot
34:26like the Winston Churchill's kind of diners that they kind of say, we should bring them back. Could
34:32we and should we see an original idea for the tea room coming back to culture now?
34:38I think we have fantastic tea rooms and coffee houses. Again, the culture has changed over the
34:44last 150 years. I definitely think there is a need for perhaps subsidised food, where people with
34:52dignity can go into a place like a willow at the tea room or like a coffee shop and be able to buy
35:00high quality, affordable food and socialise. There's such a paywall now on conversation with
35:08people and having meaningful meetings. I mean, I know for myself, me and my friends, we're all in
35:14our mid-30s. Everyone's getting married or having a baby. We struggle to find time to come together.
35:19And I think we need to revolutionise meeting in places that doesn't cost an arm and a leg,
35:25but actually can allow you to have, reduce isolation, not cost the earth and have some
35:32really great Scottish food.
35:34Yeah, because no shade to any of the bakeries in Glasgow. They're great, but they are expensive.
35:38There's really good food and I enjoy them. I love a good coffee, but the £5 coffee is coming.
35:42Yeah, I know. I was just, I've been talking this week about this new phase of the £6 croissant
35:47that everyone's chatting about. And like, there is a place for that because the commodities which
35:52go into baking are expensive. Butter, eggs, milk, these things are really expensive at the moment.
35:58Paying people a living wage is incredibly important, but also very expensive. And so
36:03eating out has become something for the elites. It's become something for people that have
36:07disposable income. So in a wider conversation about what we do with Scottish food and
36:13and repairing our food systems, having some kind of offering where people of all incomes
36:22of people can eat with dignity in public and come together.
36:26So as with a lot of things, good things come to an end. So can you talk us through how that happened?
36:31Yeah. I mean, you know, poverty is cyclical. And after the war, Glasgow experienced a big downturn.
36:37People weren't building ships to send off to war anymore. And so people have less money.
36:41You then have mortgages that start to go up. Businesses experience hardship.
36:46She began to sell off some of her tea rooms. When you get to the Second World War,
36:51rationing has a big impact on what businesses can sell. You know,
36:55a tea room that runs on the honour system and is trying to provide high quality food at cheap prices
37:00and paying people a living wage and paying towards health insurance and things like that.
37:04These are expensive things. And unfortunately, our businesses didn't survive long after the war.
37:11But again, success is also cyclical. And we are seeing now a resurgence of people celebrating the
37:18history of the tea rooms. People care so much about Rennie McIntosh. I think we are very happy to claim him
37:26as Scottish people. And I think I'd like us to do a bit more of that with Kate Cranston and her legacy.
37:32So, no, yeah, I definitely think we are... The story of tea rooms is the story of Glasgow and how
37:39Glasgow can bounce back. And that's what I think is so exciting about days like today, where we can
37:44really look at it in detail about the story of tea in Scotland.
37:49You both did talks today, didn't you?
37:51I did a talk on the look at the Scottish Women's Rural Institute cookery books and how,
37:57essentially, it's a hundred year anniversary of the first cookery book that was released from
38:00the Scottish Women's Rural Institute. Every recipe was submitted with a family recipe
38:04from women around Scotland. And over a hundred years, we can now track what was served on the
38:09tables in Scottish households and how it evolved with how women's roles in the home changed. It was
38:14a fascinating... I'm not going to say my talk was fascinating, but a fascinating day of talks.
38:20And I think there's also something to be said for the importance of events like this
38:24in creating an appetite for that kind of preservation of cultural heritage.
38:29After one of the talks earlier today, we were discussing where the things are from Kate Cranston's
38:34tea rooms, because she had numerous around the city, all of them done in this beautiful style.
38:40And, like, all of the buildings had, like, an individual, you know, bespoke works of art that
38:46nowadays you would be putting so much money into. And I think she was putting a lot of money into them.
38:51And now they're kind of all just disjointed. Obviously, Macintosh at the Willow is a beautiful
38:56example of good cultural preservation. You can come here, you can see the original doors,
39:00the building is in the original facade. There was something quite special about listening to our
39:05keynote, Perilla Kinchin, talk about this. And she had an image of the original tea rooms on,
39:08and you could see the windows of the room we were sitting in as we were listening. But, you know,
39:13there are other parts of that. There's the majority of that art and that kind of history
39:19is just sitting either in, like, museum holding collections or probably in lots of personal
39:24collections and in lofts and things. And I think the more that we can talk about this stuff and show
39:29how important it is, the more likely it's going to be protected and preserved for the next generation.
39:33I think the story of tea rooms and the story of Kate Cranston is crying out for, like,
39:38a Netflix series. Like, I want to see the crown, like that model of, like, young Kate Cranston,
39:44Kate Cranston setting up for business, Kate Cranston at the end of her life and showing, like,
39:49she had such an amazing impact of funding our artists. Glasgow would not be what it is today
39:55had Kate Cranston not taken the risk in hiring unknown artists and giving people chances. And I
40:02think that we need to do more in, number one, us celebrating our great stories and, two,
40:09lobbying people to have them recognise our stories.
40:13So, obviously, this is your second one. What have you guys got on the cards for next time?
40:17I definitely think we want to have another symposium. We're going to try and hopefully find
40:22a partner, maybe a venue, maybe sponsors. Sponsors would be good. Just because, I mean,
40:28this is amazing and so many people love it, but it is dependent on Peter and I finding the time to
40:32put together funding applications, which we can do, but it's, like, a significant, and it's not a
40:37sure thing. You know, it means if the funding stops, the events stop, which obviously we don't want
40:42to happen. So, just more campaigning, evaluation from days like today is really important to show
40:47that there is an appetite for this kind of stuff. We obviously have our own podcast. I don't know
40:51if that's okay to plug on yours. The competition. The Scottish Food History Podcast, so we're going
40:58to continue producing that. Yeah. And yeah, just see what's on the cards. You know, last year we
41:03wrote a report called Beyond the Tartan Tin, and it's about, it was more for, kind of, government and
41:09agencies and people to try and show that there is a case for investing in Scottish food history.
41:13There's an economic case, there's a culture case, there's an education case. Food history is such
41:17an untapped resource for us to connect with our own people and to connect with other people that
41:22feel Scottish around the world or have Scottish ancestry. So, I think for us this year, we're
41:27trying to act on those actions of the things that we brought out of that report, and it's things like
41:31developing education packs, developing more events, trying to connect more with the private sector in
41:36Scotland and shouting about how great our Scottish food history is. It isn't just whiskey. It isn't
41:42just haggis. It isn't just the tartan tin of shortbread. Those things are great, but the stories
41:49that go along with them, the other food that most people in this country have never heard of, that
41:54our grandparents ate every day, those are the real, that's the real gems, and that's what we're really,
41:58we're really looking for. It's an exciting time for Scottish food, and we are just here for the ride.
42:04So, anyone that wants to watch back any of the talks, will there be somewhere that they can
42:08do that? Absolutely. We don't know where yet, but if you've got Instagram, follow Tenney
42:14McKitchen and Lindsay Middleton. All the information will be put on our stories, and probably on the
42:19grid as well. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. It's been a fascinating afternoon. Thank you so much
42:23for joining us. Thank you very much for coming. And also some really good tea. It was good tea.
42:26Excellent. Love that. And cakes.
42:33Thanks to my guests for being on this episode, and thanks to you too for listening, hopefully
42:36over a good cup of tea. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode
42:41of Scran. Scran is co-produced and hosted by me, Roslyn Derskin, and co-produced, edited, and mixed by
42:47Kelly Crichton. The Scran Awards are back for 2025, and we're looking for you to get involved by nominating
42:53your favourite chef, restaurant, pub, or whiskey. For more information and to nominate, as well as buy
43:00tickets, please visit www.scranawards.co.uk.