London Tea History, Hiding in Plain Sight

Walk along Union Street in Southwark and look up. High on a brick wall, in cream and rust-red paint, are the words James Ashby & Sons Ltd, Embassy Tea & Coffee. Above them, a faded rose sits in a white panel: Rose Brand Fine Teas. Below them, for reasons that escaped me at 7.30am, is the word VENTILATORS.

I’ve walked past buildings like it for years without a second glance. Last week I finally went inside one.

The owners of Embassy Tea House in Southwark asked me to run a tea tasting at a breakfast event. The building was once home to James Ashby & Sons, tea wholesalers, and is now smart office space. The guests were property brokers whose job is to find it new occupants, and the idea was to give them a taste of the heritage they’d be selling. At half past seven in the morning.

I brought two teas. Bungalow Blend went out with breakfast and turned out to be a lifeline (the coffee queue was long, and a good strong cup of tea is a very respectable substitute). After that came a Darjeeling tea tasting, for contrast. Darjeeling is a different animal altogether: pale in the cup, a bit floral, and about as far from a builder’s brew as black tea gets. Several people said it was a refreshing way to start the day, which at that hour I took as a high compliment.

Then came the part I hadn’t seen coming. Ashby’s started trading tea in the 1850s and only moved to Union Street in the 1960s, but they created both the Embassy and the Rose brands and painted them on the side of the building for the whole street to see. The Ashby name still exists today, and the company that owns it is the same one that packs our tea. I spent years in the tea trade and never once joined those dots. So much for the trained palate. (The VENTILATORS, I’ve since learned, probably belong to the engineering firm that was there first.)

London is full of moments like that. Tea once poured into warehouses on both sides of the river, from St Katharine Docks on the north bank to Butler’s Wharf on the south, which was reputedly the largest tea warehouse in the world. A surprising amount of that London tea history is still there, painted on brick or carved above doorways, waiting for someone to look up. 

The best surprise of the morning came from the guests, though. Among the brokers were a few amateur tea buffs, and two of them, quite separately, told me the same secret. They mix Lapsang Souchong into their everyday tea for an extra smoky punch.

One of them shared their ratio: one part Lapsang, one part Earl Grey, four parts black tea. I tried it when I got home. The Lapsang brings a whiff of bonfire, the bergamot cheers it up, and the black tea stops either of them showing off.

If you fancy making a Lapsang Souchong blend of your own, Bungalow Blend makes a good base, and there’s no wrong ratio as long as you enjoy the cup. Our Lapsang blog has more on where that smoke comes from.

And if you’re ever on Union Street, look up. The rose is still there.