Our Story
The Tea House
1982
The opening of the Covent Garden Shop
Located in the heart of bustling Covent Garden, Christina Smith opened The Tea House on Neal Street in 1982. An exciting vision began to grow in popularity as a haven for tea lovers, offering a vast selection of teas and “Teaphernalia” from around the world. The shop cemented itself as an iconic spot in Covent Garden, the shop was not just a place, but a destination for enthusiasts.
2015
Going online
In 2010 Christina’s niece Katharine and nephew Alex purchased the majority shareholding of The Tea House and launched the website in 2015. Order fulfilment and despatch was completed from an office and warehouse in Dorset. Following Katharine’s tragic death in 2021, Alex made the difficult decision to close the Covent Garden shop in January 2022.
2024
A Fresh Start at Limekiln Farm, Dorset
Building on its journey, in 2024 The Tea House took another step to become sister brand to Reads Coffee Roasters in Dorset, owned by the Dick-Read family—passionate tea drinkers themselves. As they put it, "Perhaps it’s as simple as saying that whilst coffee winds us up....it's Tea that winds us down," making it only natural to balance their offering with a thoughtfully curated range of loose teas they know, trust, and enjoy personally. Under this new ownership, an exciting new chapter begins for The Tea House, continuing the original ethos of bringing the love of tea to even more people.
Where It All Began
Christina Smith
It still seems extraordinary that we have been given the privilege and opportunity to take on the Tea House, one which we would never have imagined when Giles was first introduced to Christina in the Tea House back in the early 1990’s. She made an instant and long-lasting impression on him, being one of those characters who was both exciting, and slightly terrifying, to meet, all at the same time!
Christina, and the Tea House, will be forever remembered and associated with Covent Garden. It is a place that draws people from all over the world, from the Market Piazza to Seven Dials, with its network of streets that are home to London’s most diverse range of quirky and colourful shops. It is not an understatement to say that the preservation of Covent Garden is in no small part down to Christina’s influence on the area, having been one of it’s greatest landlords in the 1960’s when she rented run down properties to an eclectic range of artisanal and unique shops and small businesses with a unique approach that combined business with philanthropy, once being quoted as saying “I have always had a faintly maternal feeling towards my tenants, even when they’re not paying their rent” and soon became known as ‘The Queen of Covent Garden’.
It was a visit to China that made a deep and long-lasting impression on Christina, a theme that ran through her own variety of small businesses and restaurants in Covent Garden, culminating in her greatest homage to the nation whose culture had so influenced her when she opened The Tea House in 1982.
Christina lived above the shop in Neal Street for many years, developing the Christina Smith foundation that supports theatre, architecture, education and the advancement of gender balance to this day and serves as a lasting epitaph to one very special woman, whom Giles feels most lucky to have met on that fateful day so many years ago.
