The Orchard, in Grantchester outside of Cambridge, is an award winning tearoom that seems to be stuck in time. It serves morning coffee, afternoon tea, and food. It has a lovely space outside under the trees where you can sit with your family and enjoy a lazy day. It is open all year round.
It was originally started in 1897 as an orchard and became a tearoom on accident. Students asked if Mrs Stevenson would serve them tea under the fruit trees and that is how it all began.
It was a famous hang out for the Grantchester Group. This was a group of friends, a few names you might know- Rupert Brooke (poet), Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophers), E.M. Foster and Virginia Woolf (novelists) Maynard Keynes (an economist) and Augustus John (an artist).
During the May Balls (like our proms- but held in June), students will punt up the river in the early hours and have a breakfast with champagne and strawberries.
The Orchard has had quite a few famous visitors over the years: Steven Hawking, Crick and Watson (DNA), A.A. Milne (Winne the Pooh), King George VI, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie.
The pamphlet you can get at The Orchard states something that quite interesting "Cambridge has won more Nobel Prizes than France and Germany, and still today, as Bill Gates of Microsoft says, contains the biggest brains in the world."
All the Best!
American to Britain