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Welcome to & mobile tea shop
All About Me
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How it all began.
Yes, that's me in the photo, trying not to look embarrassed! When I'm behind the counter or serving afternoon tea I'm in my happy place and I forget all about how uncomfortable attention is!
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I suppose it all started when I was very small when we lived in a council flat in Clapham and my very imaginative mum understood that I was more comfortable in fiction and so started reading Enid Blyton stories to me. My favourite stories were about the Faraway Tree and the children that visited. I loved the magical creatures they met and the pleasure they got from afternoon tea either in Moonface's treetop rooms or The Land of Tea Parties, one of the many lands that emerged temporarily through the clouds at the top of the tree.
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"There were pink cakes, yellow cakes, chocolate cakes, ginger cakes, cakes with fruit and silver balls all over them, cakes with frosting, cakes with flowers made from sugar, cakes as big as could be, and tiny ones only enough for two people"
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Why afternoon tea?
Visits to stay with my grandad in Caistor, Lincolnshire, complemented this love of an old-fashioned childhood. In contrast to the London council flat, I was allowed more freedom outside. My grandad had a garden and he lived in a small town. I was allowed to cycle, play on swings, go off for hours with my cousin and return to his house for the joy of tiny ham sandwiches and butter, and a Mr Kipling cake with orange squash. Even more exciting, I was allowed to help Grandad in his garden, deadheading marigolds and picking sweetpeas. We would then go into the fields and collect blackberries, and my nan would use these to make jam. I loved those two weeks of summer every year.
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Then it was 2006 and I finally decided to have my own children and create these memories for them. We didn't have much money for holidays but we wanted to take the children to Cornwall and Wales, so we bought a 1080s Eldis caravan that had been neglected in a field in Manchester. We had a lot of adventures in her even though she was dwarfed by the modern motorhomes and caravans in the camping site.
After a few years of camping, the children grew too tall for the caravan and she sat on our driveway for a few years. I was busy and teaching English in a secondary school and for relaxation, I taught myself to bake and reared my own chickens so that I could use their eggs.
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In 2018, I got married to my beloved Mike wearing a 1950s style tea dress in a tiny church in Godalming. I organised an afternoon tea wedding breakfast, sourcing the crockery over 6 months from various charity shops, which I loved. I decided to keep it and I still have a lot of it tucked away in corners of my house.
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Lockdown in 2020 meant a lot of changes: we rescued our gorgeous Labrador Astrid and I embarked on a new career path, even though I loved teaching which had become an impossibly stressful job. Mike and I built some storage for the crockery, upcycled our caravan and 5 years later here we are with two teenagers, Astrid, Luna, 8 chickens, 2 cats and a mobile afternoon tea caravan with a 5 star hygiene rating!
Our Values and Eco Journey
When you run a small business, values are really important. I am passionate about reducing single use plastic waste, thrifting rather than buying new, caring for the environment and producing good quality food without all those nasty preservatives.
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We have used a lot of the original fittings in the caravan and repurposed them. Look out for the counter and the cupboard door handles! We love the challenge and will reuse, reduce and recycle wherever we can. You might even see me showing you my charity shop finds on Instagram.
We're certainly not perfect but it's a journey that I'm happy to be on. We are mindful about the waste we produce and sourcing compostable packaging and loose leaf tea has been really important to us. I also try wherever possible to buy our ingredients from local businesses such as coffee from Bells Beans and tea from Tealicious Ltd.
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We either make our own squash, or sell canned drinks but never plastic bottles and we are always on the lookout for locally made cheese and clotted cream and homegrown fruit.
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If you ever come to see us at one of our events, the team and I will be more than happy to show you what we've done and talk to you about our story. We're a small business and so you'll always get our personalised brand of service. We can't wait to show you around.
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