To dry for
Once plain and functional, the humble tea towel has been elevated to a piece of domestic art. Flora Watkins traces its unlikely rise
The humble tea towel has become a work of art in the heart of the home, argues Flora Watkins
WHEN the textile designer Pat Albeck, also known as the ‘Queen of the Tea Towel’, passed away in September 2017, her death was marked by obituaries in all the broadsheet newspapers. Late in life, she appeared on Desert Island Discs and gave her archive to the V&A Museum, yet she had been celebrated as a Living National Treasure 20 years earlier in COUNTRY LIFE (March 4, 1993). ‘Most people think of the tea towel as a humble object,’ she said then, ‘but I think of them as wonderful rectangular shapes with which to express one’s artistic ability.’
For decades, Miss Albeck’s designs for the National Trust made a tea towel a vital part of a visit to one of its properties, points out her son, Matthew Rice, in his introduction to Pat Albeck, Queen of the Tea Towel (National Trust Books, £12.99). From the
Facing page: Royal tea towels are enduringly popular. Top, from left: Designs made by Ulster Weavers include geese, a detailed swallowtail butterfly and one inspired by samplers at Montacute House by tea-towel queen Pat Albeck 1970s until the end of her life—‘pat folded up and sent in the 2019 one [calendar] the week she died,’ Mr Rice divulges—she designed some 300 tea towels for the Trust.
Sissinghurst, Chartwell, Hardwick Hall, Lacock; all were depicted in Miss Albeck’s clean lines and clear, charming voice, although her favourite, believes Mr Rice, was the graphically striking Lanhydrock kitchen.
Mr Rice continues his mother’s legacy through his work, designing for the ceramics company of his wife, Emma Bridgewater. A game-birds tea towel has been a bestseller and he’s just designed one with deer on it.
The seeds of Miss Albeck’s success were sown in the 1950s, explains Marnie Fogg, author of The Art of the Tea Towel (Pavilion Books, £16.99). Before then, tea towels were ‘very simple; checked or striped’. Jacquard text proclaiming ‘glass cloth’ was about as elaborate as they got.
What kick-started the era of the decorative tea towel, Miss Fogghas discovered, was the 1951 Festival of Britain and the burgeoning interest in design after the grind of postwar austerity. This was seized upon by the flagging Irish linen business as a way of increasing turnover and it collaborated with the designer Lucienne Day, whose Calyx design had been a big hit at the festival. As a result, one of the first commercially successful printed tea towels was born.
However, that commercial success would not have been possible without the new focus, in the 1950s, on the kitchen as the heart of the home. Before the Second World War, middle-class families would have had a cook or a maid, but that way of life had gone for all bar a fortunate few. For housewives, a tea towel, says Miss Fogg, was a simple way of ‘zhuzhing up the kitchen, of getting art—good art—into the home’.
Pop Art, Op Art, even the Psychedelic Movement of the 1960s, all translated beautifully onto the tea towel, the last epitomised by the purples and oranges of the designer Ian Logan.
The tea towel has been a successful vehicle for all sorts of design movements, largely because it’s a ‘good field to design on’, thinks Mr Rice, ‘big and square and flat’. It’s ‘like a T-shirt— it’s a place on which you can put a slogan for everyone to see,’ adds Miss Foff. ‘If you’ve got a fiercely right-wing father-in-law coming for lunch, you could hang a Peterloo Massacre tea towel from the Radical Tea Towel Company on the Aga,’ she adds mischievously.
This once humble item has even found its way into high fashion. Bella Freud has designed a tea towel for Selfridges and fellow knitwear designer Markus Lupfer has put them in the goody bags at his London Fashion Week show.
However, if any contemporary designer is vying for Pat Albeck’s Queen of the Tea Towel crown, it’s surely Angela Harding. This printmaker’s exquisite designs sold an estimated 25,000 tea towels last year. They’re inspired by the wildlife and gently rolling countryside around her Rutland studio;
Shooting Stars, her most popular, features a hare at night.
‘They’re an easy statement, aren’t they?’ muses Miss Harding, when asked about the secret of her success. ‘You can change the feel of your kitchen quite easily with a tea towel. It was a nice way to share what I do
If you’ve got a rightwing father-in-law coming, you could hang a Peterloo Massacre tea towel on the Aga
in an affordable way. My prints sell for £160– £300, but you can buy a tea towel for £12.’
Miss Harding’s tea towels are cotton, which is less expensive than linen. ‘I like a linen tea towel, but the image didn’t work on them because it was too textured,’ she explains. ‘People primarily buy them to hang them up, so the clarity of the image was more important to me, as an artist, but they do dry absolutely fine.’
Jennie Harding’s designs for Royal Warrant holder Ulster Weavers also fall into the almost-too-pretty-to-use category. Typically, she will produce two tea towels to mark each royal event, one with a contemporary feel and one in a traditional design, as ‘more of a commemorative item’. By the time you read this, her design for The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s baby will be on the screens, ready for printing as soon as the birth is announced.
‘We get two versions ready about six months ahead, usually in blue and pink, although we’ve tried to be a lot more genderneutral lately,’ Miss Harding divulges. ‘We leave a space for the name and date. Then, as soon as we get the name, we can have them in the shops the following day.’
The designer enjoys seeing her more contemporary designs posted on Instagram, being used day to day, although she thinks people tend to keep the more traditional tea towels, such as that for The Queen’s 90th birthday, with its roses of rich, regal gold standing out against a navy background.
Those tea-towel devotees inspired to seek out some of Miss Albeck’s classic designs will be delighted to hear that they will find pages and pages of them on ebay —and in pristine condition, according to Mr Rice. ‘You’d think they’d all have died, because they’re only bits of linen, but so many people put them in frames on their walls that they didn’t. People just thought “these are too nice to wash up with”.’
You’d think they’d all have died, but people thought “these are too nice to wash up with”