Week 10

Week 10

This week Edward and I met up in the library on Friday. Unfortunately Emma was ill therefore we had to meet up without her, and talk with each other over the internet instead.

London Trip

In our discussions we have decided that we will go to London at the beginning of the February reading week which starts on the 11th. During our trip we have decided that we should visit some department stores, such as Selfridge's or Liberty. Furthermore, we should also visit some parks and gardens in London. I think it would be good to visit a tea shop in London, as tea drinking is a part of Britain's cultural identity.
From research I have found that there is a Twinings tea room on the Strand which opened in 1706. There is also a museum charting the history of the Twining family and the objects used to make and serve tea. This may provide some useful information to support our research. It may also be useful to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where there is an hourly daily tour telling the history of the museum and the highlights of its collection. This will be of value because many Londoners will have visited the Victoria and Albert Museum for leisure and pleasure, so learning its history will help us.
It will also provide us with the opportunity to ask staff more about the history of people visiting the museum - the opportunity to actually go and ask people about the history of leisure and pleasure in London will be an invaluable one, as gaining information from an expert is much better than finding potentially incorrect or disputed information from less reliable sources on the internet.

Areas of research:

I would like to research further the idea of drinking tea in London, and also the development of department stores in London. I have discovered through research that there is a UK tea council. I would also like to further research the East India Company, and perhaps find some facts and figures about tea and coffee shops in London. I will also attempt to find some Primary resources on the areas I am researching, as this will aid our presentation.

Library books and articles:
While Edward and I were meeting in the library we decided to try and find some books that would be helpful for our individual research topics. Some books and articles which I think could be helpful are:

The Opening of Selfridge's Department Store - History Today March 2009
Innovation in non-food retailing in the early nineteenth century: The curious case of the bazaar - Business History October 2010
The Department Store: A Social History by Bill Lancaster (381.1410942 LAN)
LEISURE AND THE USE OF DOMESTIC SPACE IN GEORGIAN LONDON- article by Benjamin Heller



Useful Websites :
http://www.tea.co.uk/history-of-tea
http://www.tea.co.uk/tea-a-brief-history-of-the-nations-favourite-beverage
http://www.vam.ac.uk/



Tea in London Research: 

The first dated reference to tea in this country is from an advert in a London newspaper, Mercurius Politicus, from September 1658. It announced that 'China Drink, called by the Chinese, Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee' was on sale at a coffee house in Sweeting's Rents in the City. The first coffee house had been established in London in 1652, and the terms of this advert suggest that tea was still somewhat unfamiliar to most readers, so it is fair to assume that the drink was still something of a curiosity. It was the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza (in 1662)  that would prove to be a turning point in the history of tea in Britain. She was a Portuguese princess, and a tea addict, and it was her love of the drink that established tea as a fashionable beverage first at court, and then among the wealthy classes as a whole. Capitalising on this, the East India Company began to import tea into Britain, its first order being placed in 1664 - for 100lbs of China tea to be shipped from Java.