First you heat the water…

Bath. It’s all about water.

Called Aquae Sulis by The Romans, the centrepiece of the town of Bath is a massive Roman Bath complex, with columns and statues, All very impressive. All Victorian.

Yes, in 1897, on top of the old, genuine remains, some well-meaning individuals basically rebuilt a fake that, with more than a century under its belt, is now taking on a patina of age and has some merit in itself.

The natural hot water gushing up here – it could fill your bathtub at home in 8 seconds – is full of minerals and has often been claimed as a cure for just about everything.

As delightful as a tour of the Bath baths is, spending a few hours in the company of hot water inevitably turns one’s thoughts to tea. And in the case of Bath, we had a plan.

We had heard of Sally Lunn’s; a tea shop claimed to be more than 400 years old and possibly the originator of the Sally Lunn bun, which is mentioned by Dickens and a whole host of other writers over the centuries.

I had done some research before we headed off for the place, and their menu listed loose leaf tea. That was really all I needed to know.

Of course, I further looked into the place, and to summarise, it’s messy. The Collins English dictionary attributes the invention of the bun to the 18^th century.

Sally Lunn’s House goes further and claims the bun was first baked there in 1680 by a Hugenot refugee. The entire basis of this claim is a previous owner in the 1930, who bought it when it was a grocer’s  and formerly a cab hire office. She claimed to find a document claiming this house was the place where the bun was invented – in a hidden void – but then mysteriously lost this important document, which also contained the recipe.

Whilst the remains of very old ovens have been found on the premises, it is one of the more outrageous, or at least highly suspect,  claims we’ve seen.

Anyway, we found a very old, very full, multilevel tea room, and they managed to fit us in. With a cry of “follow me” the young and fit staff member bounded up seventeen* flights of tiny stairs like a jackrabbit.

Given that I was suffering some health issues, I was loath to eat too much, so I ordered just a toasted half bun with some butter and ginger. Lady D has the same sized bun but with strawberry jam, and clotted cream. She went for a Ceylon OP, but I feel I really got into the spirit of things by ordering a Young Hyson, on the more popular teas of yesteryear when the English originally drank their tea green.

I enjoyed the tea, it was a mild and pleasant green that I could drink all day. Lady D was impressed by hers. The staff knew the range quite well and served it very well.

The famous buns were interesting. In Australia both major supermarket chains have a range of own-brand breads that include identical soft rolls, and these looked almost exactly the same in shape; though a little bigger.

I think I was expecting something sweeter. I don’t really think these are a bun as I use the term. I think they are a light, airy bread. They are perfect in a country that traditionally offers fine bread-topping food, from jam and cream to eggs and bacon.

Sally Lunn’s themselves invoke the concept of ‘trencher’ – bread being used as plate in medieval times – and I think that’s a good call. They are basically edible plates. Any taste they might have is superfluous; they are there to conduct the topping to your mouth.

I’ll award Sally Lunn’s a score of 88; quite high for a tea shop where the tea is not the main or sole focus.

Having descended the six** flights of stairs we found ourselves out in damp and chilly afternoon. Whilst we had other places to see – actually a Neolithic monument in the beer garden of a pub- we decided a short perambulate around Bath would be nice. We purchased some glassware and looked in on a place called Mad Hatter tea; which looked superb until I spotted the Tea Pigs plastic teabags along the counter.

We strolled further and were on our way back to the car when we spotted “Tea House Emporium” and its “come and see our most unusual tea room” sign. We did.

We were presented with an excellent tea menu – though quite why they put their coffee range at the front of the menu is beyond me. They had a very good tea range including many of my favourites – Temi, Harmutty etc  . They also offered quite a range of African teas – they also grouped Nilgiri teas with them on the basis they are all high grown (as are several they didn’t) which unsettled me a little

Lady D ordered the tea of the month- Luponde from Tanzania and I tried a Kenyan Tindaret, on the basis that the Lazy Literatus likes a nice Kenyan at times and this could indeed be one.

The teas were a little disappointing.  I tried mine first, and it had little taste after four minutes. (I also tried it at two and three for the same result).

I then tried the Luponde; and far from the honey tones promised on the menu, it tasted really flat. In fact, it had a taste that teabags that are majority African blends have; only magnified.

Oddly enough, the Kenyan tasted better when I went back to it after the Tanzanian. It tasted much sweeter. Lady D liked the Luponde with her usual milk and sugar; and I think that probably works, but for me, not to my taste.

The tea shop itself is fantastic, the underground tea room sensational; the range of teas brilliant; the collection of samovars superb, the young lady behind the counter enthusiastic about tea. If I’d ordered the right tea I would have loved it; I’m going to ignore my own error and give these guys a 99.

Bath is part Roman; part Georgian and a little Victorian. That’s quite apt; because after the Roman Empire fell; civilisation, particularly technology, fell a long way. It really was somewhere between Georgian and Victorian that Britain really caught up with such Roman innovations as good drainage, building things properly and flush toilets.

It’s a lesson that moving forward is not always linear – compare the incredible stone defensive walls at Caerwent  from 2000 years ago with the crude earth ones at Wareham from only 1100 years ago – and now Britain is a place where the quality of both tea and tea service is in decline. Wherever we find an outlet that preserves the quality standards and even attempts to improve them, all of us need to support them.

Civilisation itself is probably at stake. When the days comes that I can’t enjoy a Temi from a silver teapot, I think we can all agree, it’s all over.