A brief history of tea in the UK

John Wesley deplored it, Samuel Pepys was an early adopter and George Orwell wrote an essay on how to make it perfectly – for 358 years, the British people have had a love affair with tea. Today, Google is celebrating the nation’s favourite drink with a doodle. The quirky animation shows a teabag with a union jack tag (followed by a strainer, sugar, milk and honey) being dunked in a succession of cheerful cups.

On 23 September 1658, the London republican newspaper Mercurius Politicus carried the first advert for tea in the British isles, announcing that a “China drink called by the Chinese, Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee” was available in a coffee house in the city. But it was tea addict Catherine of Braganza – wife of Charles II – who turned it into a fashionable drink.

Soon the middle classes were drinking it, huge taxes were whacked on it, and tea-smuggling became a serious problem. It took William Pitt the Younger to see sense and remove the taxes before the working class could afford to settle down for a nice brew. By the mid-18th century, tea had became the country’s most popular drink – pushing ale and gin from their place in British hearts.

Before long, the East India Company was using tea clippers, such as the Cutty Sark, to bring the harvest from India and China as fast as possible, and, in 1908, the teabag was invented, revolutionising the making of the 165m cups of tea drunk in the UK every day.

Yet tea time is now under threat. It has been five years since ordinary teabag sales started to fall (5% this year to £614m), apparently because younger people have fallen out of love with builder’s brew. While a third of 55- to 64-year-olds have a restorative cup of char more than five times a day, only 16% of 16- to 34-year-olds do the same. Sales of green tea, on the other hand, have shot up.

One thing that is not yet over is the storm in a teacup: in June, Aung San Suu Kyi was slammed as a “disgrace” by the grandson of former dictator General Ne Win – for serving Lipton tea at a banquet. “It should be at least Twinning’s [sic] Earl Grey or Fortnum and Mason’s Queen Anne Tea,” he wrote on Facebook.

• This article was amended on 23 September to correct references to the United Kingdom in 1658. The United Kingdom came into existence in 1707.