Time For Tea: Tea the Tenth

You can never get a cup of tea large enough
or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis

The Tiled Hall, Leeds City Art Gallery - Tuesday 27th May 2013

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Tea Takers

Sarah Ryan

Paul Ryan

Olivia Ryan

Jean Thacker

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Time for tea in Leeds, my home town, or at least the place that I lived the longest while growing up, and also the birthplace of my father. I had in mind this particular location from very early in my odyssey plan. The Tiled Hall is a long room linking the Art Gallery and City Library. Built between 1878 and 1884, the library building is a manifestation of typical Victorian municipal pride. It sits next to the Town Hall and deliberately echoes its neo-classical grandeur but with a deliberately distinct style, and you can still sense the great Yorkshire pride of the aldermen and eminent burghers who masterminded their construction.

In the picture above the library building is largely obscured by a tree, but the lowest arched windows are those of the Tiled Hall itself. This hall was the initial reading room for the city's Free Library, and is a brilliantly exuberant setting with grand marble columns, ornate Burmantofts tiles, barrel vaulted mosaic ceiling and original parquet flooring. Used as reading room and then sculpture gallery, the hall with its colourful tiles was covered up in the 1950s in order to allow the expansion of the Commercial and Technical library; the glories of the room were only rediscovered during renovation work in the 1990s and were eventually restored and became the adjoining Art Gallery's cafe.

The library is somewhere I visited frequently as a child and it has important memories and links for me which made it an excellent place for tea.

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A Family Tea

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Eric Thacker

29^th September 1923 – 5^th November 1997

Priest, poet, jazz critic, artist, story-teller, song writer, theologian, calligrapher, humourist, surrealist, cartoonist, wise counsel, scholar, classical musician, polymath, crossword solver, actor, early riser, letter-writer, book-lover, word-lover, clutter-creater, historian, traveller, Yorkshire-man, hymnologist, ornithologist, utterly devoted husband and father, and my Pa.

The City Library in Leeds was for him a lifelong favourite haunt and source of delight, refuge and sustenance.

It also was probably kept afloat through most of the 20^th century on the back of his overdue book fines...

I so wish he could have been at some of these teas with me, so to come here to the library is a special link to him. Although I have a more than sneaking suspicion that he would have preferred a steak and kidney pie with a pint of Guinness to a scone any day.

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The Tiled Hall is simply a cafeteria but does serve a fine variety of cake, and the man behind the counter endeared himself to me immediately by offering us the use of his display cake stand when I asked for a range of cakes on one large plate. The spectre of Pa was most definitely in the air - included among the offerings were cakes featuring Dandelion and Burdock and 'Caramac' - two things to which he was very partial and which I certainly haven't found among the ingredients anywhere else yet...