What’s Your Cup of Tea, Commissioned by the Museum of the Home, 2021-22

Making a cuppa is rooted in British culture and custom; familiar, comforting and welcoming. Sharing tea is deeply social, representing a moment you feel welcomed and invited into a home. Making tea for yourself can be a moment of self care. Within the context of the Museum of the Home, Tea touches on the history of Sir Robert Geffrye’s wealth from the East India Company, notions around Britishness and cultural imports, and of Empire.

Over 2021-2022 we worked with local residents of the Arden Estate to create a local tea blend for the Museum of the Home, Hackney. Since then the museum has been serving this resident's tea every Friday for ‘Free Tea Fridays’ encouraging the local community to come to the museum, to find moments of connection and a social hub. During these Fridays, the tea was served in commemorative/ celebratory mugs, which the local community had nominated people to be on.

Commemorating is an act of remembrance and celebration, and in a time when the public are questioning who gets celebrated and why, we were actively creating a platform to ask the public to make the nominations: fathers, wives, bin men, NHS workers, unsung heroes, alive or dead. Mugs have been used as political tools in the past, as a mode of information and education, which can be seen in the abolitionist mugs in the Museum of Home collection. As our mugs enter the archive of the Museum our mugs become a tool for remembering local residents, as equals and will join the museum’s collection of pre-existing commemorative mugs.

All profits from serving the tea in the cafe and sales from the tea in the Museum shop will be used to provide the free tea, where serving tea serves the community.

As social practice artists, we are using the social language of serving tea as a way to create an engaging project about home, welcome, celebration and remembrance, whilst also touching on the context of the museum's history and its relation to Tea via the East India Company, in a time when statues are coming down.