The Royal Bank of Scotland’s first new £20 note in 23 years features the image of Glasgow tea room maven Kate Cranston. It is also the first of that denomination to feature a woman other than the queen on its face.

The bust of Catherine “Kate” Cranston dominates the face side. The background picture is of Cranston’s most famous Willow Tea Rooms (1903). Although the legendary entrepreneur had a central role in promoting tea rooms as a genteel alternative to pubs, she was also a major patron of architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and was an astute businesswoman. When she died at 85, she left two-thirds of her estate to the poor of Glasgow.

Royal Bank of Scotland board chairman Malcolm Buchanan explained the bank’s decision to depict Cranston: “Kate Cranston’s legacy touches so many aspects of Scottish life that we, as a nation, are justifiably proud: entrepreneurship, art, philanthropy, and dedication.”

The Willow Tea Rooms (now Mackintosh at the Willow) have just been fully restored and re-opened to the public, delighting tea enthusiasts and architectural students from around the world.

I first visited in 1995 while producing The Great Tea Room of Britain and have been back four times over the years, including an August visit when Jane Pettigrew, my wife Shelley, and I enjoyed a tour and tea lunch.

Kate Cranston’s Glasgow tea rooms were famous for their unique, modern design, and she sought out young, local, new talent so as to use the artists’ work in the creation of her innovative and inspirational style. In 1888, she commissioned George Walton to rework the interior of the Crown Tea Room in Argyle Street. But it was the connection between Kate Cranston and Charles Rennie Mackintosh that became world famous.

When she opened her third tea room at 91-93 Buchanan Street in 1897, Kate commissioned Walton to design the interior and the furnishings and Mackintosh to create the stenciled murals. When she decided to expand the Crown Tea Rooms on Argyle Street in 1899, Kate had Mackintosh design the furniture while Walton worked on the decoration and the fixtures. In 1900, Kate Cranston commissioned Mackintosh and his wife, artist Margaret Macdonald, to add a ladies’ luncheon room and basement billiard room to Ingram Street.

In 1903, Mackintosh and Macdonald designed every element of the interior and exterior of the new Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. The designs included a “Salon de Luxe”, which the local paper The Bailie described as “simply a marvel of the art of the upholsterer and decorator. And not less admirable, each in its own way, are the tea gallery, the lunch rooms, the billiard room, and the smoking room.” The various tea rooms were popular meeting places for people from a cross-section of Glasgow society—men and women, young and old, upper, middle, and working class.

If Kate Cranston’s vision and enterprise made Glasgow famous for its tearooms, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and “The Glasgow Four” brought the city international acclaim for its design and art. The “Four,” whose vision came to be known as “the Glasgow Style,” were Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair, Margaret Macdonald, and her sister Frances.

Developed out of the Arts and Crafts movement, their work was characterized by long, elegant, rectilinear lines, indulgent sweeping curves, latticework, geometric shapes, Celtic motifs, large, full-petalled rose blooms, and tall, slender girls with flowing black hair and plump ruby lips.

The work of the Four encompassed architecture, interior design, wall panels, furniture, fabrics, screens, pottery, embroidery, jewelry, stained glass, wood carving, and metalwork. This organic method was similar to the work being done in America by Frank Lloyd Wright. In both locations, the architects drew inspiration from the Japanese art aesthetic, illuminated by Okakura Kakuzo in The Book of Tea.

In 2021 and 2022, I had the great pleasure of telling the story of Cranston and Mackintosh to audiences in Nashville, Albuquerque, and St. Petersburg as an exhibition of Mackintosh furniture and art made its way to art museums in those cities.

My heart leaped last year when I spotted a Mackintosh chair in a North Carolina antique shop. It was marked down, and I’m sure it had sat there for months because no one knew its provenance. I paid for it quickly before I told them what it was and brought it to Kentucky.

I am thrilled to give this reproduction Argyle Street Tea Room chair a prominent place in our home, and I tell the Kate Cranston story to everyone who visits!

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