Commemorative plaques highlight tea
Commemorative plaques highlight tea
UK
In November the first of three plaques marking tea’s history in London was unveiled by Guy Chambers, chairman of James Finlay at Commodity Quay, St. Katherine Docks, London. This comes after two years of work by the recently formed London Tea History Association. In 2014, a group of people who have worked in the London tea trade for many years realized that, sadly, there was no public record or evidence of tea’s 350-year history and importance in the City of London.
So they set about rectifying this situation and set up the London Tea History Association with the aim of recording the history of tea in the capital and looking at the possibility of having three bronze plaques placed in strategic locations – St. Katherine Docks (one of the docks where millions of square feet of storage space once housed tea, sugar, spices, etc., but closed in 1968); Plantation Place (originally Plantation House) where the tea auctions took place for many years; and Sir John Lyon House, which became the center of the tea trade from 1971 to 2000.
The association also aims to create a tea walk around London, promote tea tourism in the UK, and commemorate the contribution of the UK tea industry to the city and to the international world of tea.