The Orchard
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- For the music label, see The Orchard (music label)
The Orchard is a tea garden in Grantchester, near Cambridge. Since opening in 1897, it has been a popular retreat for Cambridge students, teachers and tourists, with many famous names among its patrons. The Orchard is open every day of the year from 9:00 to 17:30 in winter and 19:00 in summer, and can be reached both by road from Cambridge or by punt down the Cam. Punts or a canoe can also be rented there. There is also a Rupert Brooke Museum at the premises.
[edit] History
The history of The Orchard started in 1897 when a group of Cambridge students asked the landlady, Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House, if they could take their tea in the orchard rather than on the front lawn as the custom was. This practice soon became the norm, and the place grew in popularity. The next phase in the history of The Orchard began when the poet Rupert Brooke took up lodging in the house in 1909. A graduate student of great popularity in the university community at the time, Brooke soon attracted a great following at the place, among them Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – the so-called Grantchester Group, or the neo-pagans as Woolf called them. Brooke later lodged in a neighbouring house, the Old Vicarage, now owned by Cambridge scientist Mary Archer and her husband, Jeffrey Archer, and immortalised both houses in his poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester. Written while Brooke was in Berlin in 1912, the poem ends with the famous lines:
| Stands the church clock at ten-to-three And is there honey still for tea? |
The Orchard was later frequented by the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, as well as by several other notable people connected to Cambridge one way or another.
