This week, for a change, we have paintings by contemporary artists, all of whom are inspired by what is often the hub, the heart, and the most-used room in the home: the kitchen. In the past, the majority of kitchen interiors featured staff, servants, cooks, and paid helps. But now that most people run their home without help, the kitchen is a timeless and ever-fascinating subject for both painters and viewers. This is A Corner of a Stockwell Kitchen (2023) by Eleanor Crow who recently had a selling exhibition at Town House Spitalfields.

Here we see two women reading their newspapers at a Lyon's Teashop on Piccadilly in London in a 1953 photograph by Bert Hardy for Picture Post. Sadly, newspapers are no longer provided for customers in British cafes (many European cafes continue to have national and  local papers, and what a joy this is) but readers still read and writers still write their books in cafes, just as Simone de Beauvoir et al did at the Café de Flore.

Many tea rooms were far from large and lavish like Lyons. Even the Provincial Lady chooses to partake of her "usual lunch of baked beans and a glass of water in a small and obscure café" in Plymouth in order to avoid a hotel lunch with the grand Lady B and having to listen to her solutions to the "servant difficulty" (which illustrate why so many young women preferred to work as Nippies.) This is The Café (Café Conte) (1937/8, Manchester Art Gallery) by (Frank) Graham Bell (1910-43) which was itself a place where impecunious artists met.

A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves was published in 1914, soon after the establishment of the Lyons Corner Houses in London and the slightly earlier chain of ABC (Aerated Bread Company) tea rooms. The novel provides a fascinating insight into the world of the fictional 'Imperial' tea rooms but from the angle of employer and employees. These vast businesses employed large numbers of female staff including the waitresses, nicknamed 'Nippies' in 1926, and, in doing so, freed many from going into service (although there were still many downsides, as Amber Reeves shows).

This week on the Post we have tea shops - and tea rooms, cafes, and coffee houses. All of which played a huge role in the emancipation of women as respectable, affordable places that a working or non-working woman could go to alone or to meet friends or a man without fear of transgressing social rules. They appear in so many novels and stories, it is surprising their importance has not been written about. Or maybe it has? This is Café Scene (1939, Tate) by Edward le Bas (1904-66), a short story in itself.