Thank you to everyone who came to a beautiful service of Compline by Candlelight, followed by our latest St Olave Lecture.
A huge thank you to Lisa Honan CBE for a fascinating and entertaining talk exploring the remarkable history of tea and its connections with the City of London, including our own church and parish, which was for many years the centre of the tea trade in London.
Lisa took us from the coffee houses of seventeenth-century London, where tea first became fashionable, through the influence of Catherine of Braganza and the diaries of Samuel Pepys, to the extraordinary growth of the East India Company and the global tea trade.
Along the way, we discovered the role of London’s tea auctions, the Boston Tea Party, the great tea clipper races and the origins of tea cultivation in India.
Of particular interest were the connections with our own parish, which was once at the very centre of the global tea trade. Nearby Mincing Lane became known as the “Street of Tea” after the London Tea Auction moved to the London Commercial Salerooms there in 1834. Tea merchants, brokers and warehouses clustered around the street, and in 1937 the auctions moved to the purpose-built Tea Trade Centre at Plantation House. For generations, tea from across the world was bought and sold on the doorstep of St Olave’s, making this small corner of the City an international centre of commerce.
The story was not without its darker chapters. Lisa also explored the connections between tea, colonial exploitation, slavery, the opium trade and the difficult conditions endured by plantation workers. Her talk offered a fascinating reminder of how something as familiar as a cup of tea connects us with centuries of commerce, politics and human history.
Thank you to Lisa and everyone who joined us for such an enjoyable and thought-provoking evening, to Jack and Isaac for these lovely photos and to all from the church who helped welcome so many guests to the service and talk.
