Where to Get Good Chinese Tea in London Just Before World War One?
Posted: September 21st, 2013 | No Comments »Well this is one of those slightly obscure posts because the venue is fictional. I happened to be reading Compton Mackenzie’s 1912 novel Carnival and a rather interesting place, fictional I think sadly, popped up. Carnival is, as one publishers blurb explains:
The moving romance of dancer Jenny Pearl: a story which helped establish Mackenzie among the foremost novelists of his generation. Jenny Pearl, a dancer, falls in love with Maurice Avery, a young dilettante who leaves her when she refuses to become his mistress. Despairingly, she falls into a loveless marriage with Trewhella, a Cornish farmer who becomes insanely jealous when Avery reappears on the scene…Vivid, moving and ultimately tragic, CARNIVAL was first published in 1912 to wide critical acclaim, helping to establish Mackenzie as one of the foremost British novelists of his generation. It has since been filmed three times and adapted for the stage and as an opera.
At one point young Jenny is walking out with Maurice in central London. Maurice decides he needs a cup of decent coffee and, in these wonderfully pre-Starbucks/Costa days, as they’re in Soho Square suggests a coffee shop venue to Jenny (who dances at the wonderfully named Orient Palace of Varieties on Piccadilly*), who’s a bit bemused:
“…where’s this unnatural tea-shop?”
“Just here”
“It Looks like the Exhibition”
It was a dim coffee-shop hung with rugs and gongs. The smoke of many cigarettes and joss-sticks had steeped the gloom with Arabian airs.
“It is in a way a caravanserai,” said Maurice.
“A What?” said Jenny.
“A caravanserai – a Turkish pub, if you like it better.”
“You and I are seeing life today.”
“I like my coffee freshly ground,” Maurice explained.
“Well, I like tea.”
“The tea’s very good here. It’s China.”
“But I think China tea’s terrible. More like burnt water than tea.”
“I’m afraid you don’t appreciate the East,” he said.
“No I don’t if it means China tea.”
“I wish I could take you away with me to Japan. We’d sit under a magnolia and you should have a kiss for every petal that fell.”
“That sounds rather nice.”
*=there was a music hall called the Oriental Palace of Varieties, established by the Dan Leno Company in 1896 but it was south of the river in Camberwell (below).
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