We visited Mackintosh at the Willow ahead of Afternoon Tea Week 2023

Monday 7 August kicks off Afternoon Tea Week, a seven day period during which the people of Great Britain are encouraged to get together and celebrate our historic tradition of the fine china tea and cake appointment which is perhaps the most dignified aspect of our social calanders. In aid of the event we visited Sauchiehall Street’s well known tea spot Mackintosh at the Willow, originally opened in 1903 based on designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald, and then restored and reopened in 2018 by the Willow Tea Rooms Trust.

Speaking to Heather, a tour guide for the organisation, she said: “It was a Glasgow entrepreneur called Celia Sinclair Thronqvist MBE, she was walking down Sauchiehall Street and seen the for sale sign and said ‘absolutely not, this has to be a heritage site, it should be open again’, so she founded the Willow Rooms Trust and from there they managed to raise just shy of £10 million to do all the restorative work of the building.

“Miss Cranston was a great entrepreneur here in Glasgow. She had four tea rooms in total. This was the fourth and final one and the only one designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald. One of the briefs for the tea room was ‘fairytale’ and I think you can see that here when you join us at Mackintosh at the Willow, the whole place is just stunning.”

The ritual of afternoon tea started in around 1840 when the 7th Duchess of Bedford, Anna Russell, developed a habit of asking for trays of tea, bread, butter and cake at around 4pm each day. Her friends then began to join her and it became an upper class social event. During the 1880s the delicacy moved to the drawing room and the women of high society would change into formalwear.

“We opened originally in 1903, and as I say Miss Cranston had other tea rooms, people knew who Miss Cranston was, she was famous. She would wear a crinoline hoop skirt and go walking around the city. The tea rooms were very very popular.

“The Mackintosh’s really take from nature. They were kind of training in that arts and crafts time and then of course explored into art nouveau. There’s a rose that’s attributed to the Mackintosh’s, some people call it the Glasgow Rose, some people call it the Mackintosh Rose. Margaret MacDonald tended to use that in her art work, and that element comes in a lot here.

“So the tea room is actually called the Willow Tea Rooms due to Sauchiehall Street itself. ‘Alley of the Willows’ is what ‘Sauchiehall’ means. People think it’s from our blue willow china, but it’s down to nature itself, it comes from the willow trees that would have been down here way back when.”