October 2024: Time for Tea – a history of British teapots and tea drinking

To be held on 16 October 2024

This lecture serves as an introduction to the teapot collection at Norwich Castle Museum which has the largest specialist collection of British ceramic teapots in the world, housed in the Twining Teapot Gallery. It looks at the changing role of tea from its introduction in the 17th century as a fashionable and expensive drink of great exoticism associated with courtly and aristocratic circles through to its eventual position at the centre of the British psyche as the ‘national drink’. This lecture also examines the development of the teapot as it reflects the technological advances and developments of general British ceramic history. The lecture combines both art and social history to trace the unique position teapots and tea drinking occupy in British culture.