Alice Loxton

speaker

770 appearances 11 recordings 7 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Alice Loxton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

You're Dead to Me · Why do British people love tea? (from Here For The History) · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

So by 1834, there's a lot of mills and factories where they're giving workers particular moments in the day which are specified as tea break.

Absolutely.

And during these gruelling shifts of long hours in the mills and the factories, they see tea as this great stimulant.

It's really sugary.

Yeah, it's an energy drink.

And we heard from Charles Dickens, but the British food historian, Penn Vogler, she has also written about this.

And she says that, interestingly, the way that Dickens writes about it, there is a bit of a divide between coffee and tea.

And that manifests as the baddies, the evil characters drinking coffee and the goodies, the good people in the books drinking tea.

Takes ages to make.

Yeah, well, you know, I think in this situation, it would mean that you played the baddie and I was the good character.

So I'm all for it, all for Penn Vogler's theory.

But the crucial point is that the Industrial Revolution seems to cement tea as this warm and sustaining drink that's good for our health.

But I suppose the key point here is that in the Industrial Revolution, tea is cemented as not just a kind of warm and cosy drink, but actually one that's really integral for our health.

And we actually spoke to a tea expert, Jane Pettigrew, and her theory is that Britain's success during the Industrial Revolution could be credited to the importance of tea.

Just the simple point that the water had to be boiling, so that made it safer to drink, or the fact you've got milk for protein and sugar for energy, all of this was fuelling a workforce of healthy workers.

Absolutely.

The temperance movement, I think, is how it's described.

And Florence Nightingale, who was the founder of Modern Nursing, she recommended it.

So she said that it was certain that there is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.

He can take it when he can take nothing else and he often can't take anything else if he has it not, which is a bit of a convoluted way of just saying that they would often give tea to the patients.

Showing 701–720 of 770 · page 36 of 39