In 1894, Lipton moved his headquarters to London, where he became a national figure due to his generosity and his friendship with Edward VII. When he died, he left his estate to his beloved Glasgow to help the city's poor.

In the early 1800s, tea was still the preserve of the privileged few, a precious commodity locked away in a cabinet and doled out a leaf at a time by the mistress of the house. Glasgow's suburban tea gardens became fashionable resorts with their plants and flowers, exotic animals, tea, whisky and ale. It was not until the boom in the 1880s that food became more affordable. Before the war, Scottish consumption of sweets — jams, biscuits and confectionary — was three times that of England.

The Notorious Scottish sweet-tooth played a major role in the development of the Tea Room. As tea became more affordable, and therefore more popular, tea rooms flourished in Scotland. Tea was also a powerful weapon in the Temperance Movement against the evils of alcohol, especially at a time when alcohol abuse and the industrial revolution went hand-in-hand. Glasgow was at this time known as the "Workshop of the World" and as Britain's most whisky-sodden city.

The soothing repose of the Tea Room became a welcome refuge from the battles raging between temperance and alcohol. Here one could drink tea, coffee, or chocolate, gorge on sweets and play endless games of billiards while inhaling tobacco fumes. Although condemned by the most extremely temperate as "tea-sodden" wretches that are worse than drunkards" who "inhale the smoke of cheap cigarettes," it was not easy for Glaswegians to envision the tea rooms as dens of vice, especially when so many could recall their hard-drinking youth.

The Glasgow tea rooms bravely weathered the hard times through two world wars, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, slum, poverty, working class unrest and the notorious razor gangs, remaining essentially unchanged, but for ownership and decor. The middle class still had money to spend and more leisure time. Visitors were overwhelmed by the opulence of the tea rooms, where tea time was equivalent to dinner time anywhere else.

Even during Word War II, a visiting journalist was shocked by the "garganuan ovens, specklessly clean, in whose shelves large fowls and plump turkeys lie sizzling and richly browning. Here the flanks of surloins, of pies decked with the luscious stars and medallions of flaky paste, change colour with a becoming slowness."

Nowhere else in the world were the tea rooms so spectacular, even down to the decor: "There is, in truth, a golden bloom over everything, a lovely sheen as though the midsummer sun were shining, which turns your thoughts from the chilly world without and fills you with a new life."

These magificent tea rooms are by and large a thing of the past. Wine bars became all the rage and replaced quaint old tea rooms with modern kitsch. Last I heard, though, you could still find a tea room or two in the same old locations on Union and Sauchiehall Streets, such as the renowned Willow Tea Rooms, located at 217 Sauchiehall Street (Sauchiehall means Willow in Scots), designed by the internationally renowned Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.