Did you start the day with a cup of tea? Statistics suggest that you did — the UK Tea Council estimates that we each drink three cups a day, on average. Did you add sugar to your tea? At present only around a third of Britons do, although 41% of Scots sweeten their tea, according to a survey carried out in 2013. In 1951 the figure was much higher. Three quarters of housewives took their tea sweet. But when did we start drinking tea with sugar, and why?
It seems that Britain didn’t become a nation of sweet tea drinkers until the nineteenth century. Clearly, no one in the British Isles was drinking tea before the East India Company began importing it from China in the 1600s. Interestingly, however, the people who made sweet tea the national beverage were not the wealthy elites who could afford imported luxuries. Britain became a nation of sweet tea drinkers because of the Industrial Revolution.
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