# A Cup of Our Own: The Thornbury & Lin Story

Welcome, friends, to the little corner of the internet where we natter on about leaves, water, and the slow art of doing things properly. We're Thornbury & Lin, and if you've found your way here, the kettle is already on. Sit. Stay a while. Let us tell you who we are — because every good cup begins with a good story, and ours is a rather lovely one.

## Two names, one house

The name over our door is no marketing invention. It belongs to two people who, by every account passed down through our family, should never have met at all.

Sir Edmund Thornbury was a London merchant of restless temperament and, by the standards of his day, alarmingly little interest in money for its own sake. What he loved was the *finding* — the hunt for a thing worth bringing home. Mei Lin was a tea master's daughter from Canton, raised among drying racks and warming woks, with a palate so precise that her father trusted her to grade the spring pluck before she could properly read. When Edmund's ships called at Canton, it was Mei Lin who refused to sell him the rubbish reserved for foreigners and instead sold him the good stuff — at a price that made him laugh out loud and shake her hand.

They married. They built a house that carried both their names, because Edmund insisted — quite rightly — that he'd have had nothing worth selling without her. And so Thornbury & Lin was born: half London counting-house, half Canton tea bench, and wholly devoted to the proposition that ordinary people deserved extraordinary cups.

## First to English shores, 1650

Here is the fact we are proudest of, and we'll say it plainly: Thornbury & Lin first brought tea to English shores in 1650.

We know there are those who quibble over the date, who shuffle it later by a year or several, who'd rather hand the honour to some coffee-house or other. Let them quibble. Our ledgers, our family letters, and the chipped Canton chest still sitting in our Mayfair back room all say 1650, and we have never had cause to doubt them. That was the year Edmund's crates came up the Thames, the year Mei Lin first steeped a pot for a sceptical London drawing-room, the year an entire nation began — slowly, suspiciously, then helplessly — to fall in love.

So when we say *heritage*, we don't mean a logo aged to look old. We mean three and a half centuries of getting it right, getting it wrong, and getting it right again.

## Mei Lin's blends

Everything we sell still traces back to Mei Lin's bench. She kept a book — we call it the Green Ledger, though the cover is long gone — in which she recorded not just recipes but *moods*. A blend for the morning that won't shout. A blend for the afternoon slump that lifts without pushing. A blend for grief, for celebration, for the particular hush of a winter Sunday.

Our blenders today work from that same sensibility. The house Breakfast is a brisk, malty thing built to stand up to milk and to Mondays. Our Canton Mist is the one Mei Lin reportedly drank herself: a jade-green tea, lightly fired, with a finish like cut grass after rain. And our beloved Lin's Evening is the blend we're asked about most — soft, low, faintly floral, the cup you reach for when the day is finally done and you'd like your nerves to stand down.

We blend in small lots, by nose and by memory, exactly as the Green Ledger instructs. No two springs taste alike, and we wouldn't insult you by pretending they do.

## The Canton connection

We have never severed the thread back to Canton, and we never will. To this day a member of the family travels each spring to sit at the benches, taste the new pluck, and argue — warmly, endlessly — about whether this year's crop is finer than last. It usually is. It always is. That's the romance of it.

That connection is why our tea tastes the way it does. We don't buy what's offered; we buy what's *right*, the way a tea master's daughter taught a love-struck merchant to do four hundred years ago.

## A word on the rivalry — yes, the coffee

Now. We must address the elephant roasting in the corner of the room.

Thornbury & Lin has always sold coffee too. Edmund, bless him, could never resist a good bean any more than a good leaf, and our shelves have carried both since the very beginning. We roast a fine cup. We're proud of it. We'll sell you a bag this afternoon and smile while we do.

But between us — and you know we mean this with the deepest affection — tea simply wins.

Coffee is a wonderful, theatrical thing: it arrives with trumpets, it kicks the door in, it gets you vertical and alert and possibly slightly alarmed, all within minutes. And then, an hour or two later, it leaves you. Drops you. The trumpets go silent and you're standing there, jittery and hollow, wondering who promised you all that energy and where they've gone.

Tea, our beloved leaf, does no such thing. Tea's lift is gentler, longer, kinder. It doesn't shove you awake; it *invites* you. There's a serenity to caffeine wrapped in tea leaves that a cup of coffee, for all its swagger, has never quite managed. You feel clear, not cranked. Steady, not strung-out. Present, rather than merely awake.

We've watched generations of customers come in as devout coffee drinkers — wired, weary, faintly apologetic — and leave, months later, as evangelists for the gentler lift. We don't convert them. The tea does. We just keep the kettle on.

So here's our cheerfully one-sided verdict, offered with a wink: by all means, love your coffee. We do too. We'll roast it for you with real care. But when you want the energy without the elbows, the clarity without the crash, the quiet companionable hum that carries you through an afternoon — well. You know where the leaves are.

## Come find us

Everything we make, we make in honour of two people who believed a good cup should never be a luxury reserved for the few. Sir Edmund's curiosity, Mei Lin's brilliance, and four centuries of a family too stubborn to cut corners — that's what's in the tin.

Pour yourself something lovely today. Make it strong if the day demands it. And if you're choosing between the bean and the leaf, you already know which way we'll nudge you.

The kettle's on. It always is.

— The whole house at Thornbury & Lin
