The Orchard Tea Garden

Just a short stroll, bicycle ride, punt or car trip away from the bustle of Cambridge lies the Orchard Tea Garden in Grantchester; a corner of England where time stands still as the outside world rushes by. The Orchard, first planted in 1868, became a tea garden purely by chance. In 1897 a group of Cambridge students asked Mrs Stevenson, who lived in Orchard House and usually served tea and cakes from one of her front rooms or the garden, if she would serve them beneath the blossoming fruit trees of the Orchard. They were unaware that, on that spring morning, they had started a great Cambridge tradition and little has changed since then. It is still a rite of passage for every new undergraduate at Cambridge University to walk or cycle along the Grantchester Grind, or punt upstream to exchange the formal surroundings of the Backs, for the peace and tranquillity of the meandering River Cam and to enjoy home made scones