It’s odd to be mocked by baked goods, but that’s exactly what happened recently when I took a break from working in the reading rooms at the British Library for an afternoon pick-me-up of sugar and caffeine. There, peering up from the counter of the library cafe, was a beige doubledecker biscuit with marzipan teeth and goggly eyes called a “monster cookie – raawrr”. It was priced at £5.95. A simple cup of tea to go with the snack cost £2.25, meaning that for both, you’d be pushing a tenner. That grinning biscuit was taking the piss.
These extortionate prices are not unique to the British Library. I took my toddler to the National Maritime Museum, and ended up spending £7.80 on tea and a bit of cake to take the edge off being up since 6am. Cakes are luxuries we can do without, but the prices of hot drinks in our leading cultural institutions seem particularly outrageous, having rocketed up (like everything else) in the past year or so. The British Library even looks reasonable compared with most, and it’s not just a London thing, either – the Museum of Liverpool charges £2.60 for a tea; it’s £2.50 at the Imperial War Museum North, and at the National Museum of Scotland, £2.70.
You don’t have to be a retail analyst to work out that a bulk-bought teabag, a cup and a squirt of hot water costs next to nothing. With a tea at Costa or Caffè Nero costing £2.65, these prices are around “market rate”. But with tea, as with the rents, that doesn’t mean they’re fair. As with so many aspects of our lives during the cost of living crisis, the pain is in the principle as much as the wallet, the sense that we’re being taken for a ride by corporate bosses – and biscuits – laughing at our acquiescence.
There’s an argument that it’s churlish to complain. The British Library and many museums are free to use, so perhaps dropping a tenner on tea and snacks now and then isn’t a big deal. The British Library’s cafes have been run by the catering firm Graysons since 2016, when it won a £4m a year contract, and these revenues are important in our age of never-ending austerity. But why should perma-skint writers, academics, students, tourists, and that old chestnut, hard-working families, be forced to make up for woeful government funding of the arts and culture? Often owned by overseas entities (Graysons Hospitality was recently bought by the US catering giant Aramark), these cafes and restaurants undermine efforts to make our institutions accessible to all. It’s fine having well-publicised campaigns around diversity and inclusion, but high prices for food and drink can be just as much a barrier to participation as intimidating jargon.
It’s even worse when outsourced catering firms charge high prices in places we have to attend out of painful necessity, rather than for leisure or work. When my partner and I were going through the stressful and frequently heart-rending process of IVF, it was demoralising to join the long queues at the local hospital’s dilapidated Costa for a rip-off tea or coffee. These are times when the simple comfort of a hot drink can make such a difference that they ought to be a right, not an unaffordable expense.
There is another way of doing things. I grew up in Methodist church halls where there was always a tea urn emitting steam and chuntering violently in the corner of the kitchen, like Thomas the Tank Engine having a nervous breakdown. Hot drinks were poured from giant battered aluminium teapots that must have witnessed thousands of hours of the mundane chatter that make up a community. There’d be a dish out to throw a few coins in if you could afford it, and the after-service brew seemed to be as important a ritual as the sermons and hymns that preceded it.
In my local Highams park, a fantastic bit of green space on the edge of Epping Forest in north-east London, Humphry’s cafe is a community-supported venue in a former social hut for postwar prefab houses, where you can always have a big cup of builder’s tea for £1. As a result, it’s a fantastically welcoming space, always busy, with anyone from school kids bunking off to dog walkers, pram-pushers and senior citizens putting the world to rights. Yes, you can still buy avocado on sourdough toast if you have the readies, but the presence of that cheap brew makes the cafe what it is – accessible and open to all the community.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable that museums, galleries, major libraries, hospitals and so on could take a lead from churches or my humble local cafe and start offering tea (or instant coffee) for far less than the preposterously high prices they charge now. Politicians love to brandish mugs of tea in weird displays of authenticity, but it’s galling that they have their hot beverages heavily subsidised by the taxpayer in the House of Commons cafes, where a brew costs as little as 70p.
With that in mind, it’s about time we reclaimed institutional tea and campaigned for the simple comfort of our national drink at a reasonable price – #onequidtea for all. Perhaps then we’d even be able to push the boat out and buy a monster cookie to go with it.
• Luke Turner is a writer, editor and the author of two books, Men at War and the Wainwright prize-shortlisted Out of the Woods
