CommuniTea is a Tea Room, snack bar and community hub run by CommuniTea CIC in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in the North West of England. They have each served and continue to serve their local communities and have a particular and helpful fascination with the health benefits and nutritional value of tea. This includes its popular use at home, recreationally and culturally, and as a healthy substitute for other drinks. It is CommuniTea’s ambition to become a one-stop shop for tea drinking and welfare support in the community, working in partnership with other businesses and agencies to offer the best community facilities it can. Each member of CommuniTea has first-hand experience of the products they will be selling and each has excellent business acumen. Their unique blend of retail, cultural and community experience makes this business a very attractive proposition to stakeholders: customers, partners, suppliers and investors. The United Kingdom has a super-diverse population with strong historical and present day links with their ancestral home countries. Many of these countries have been exporting tea to the UK and the rest of the world for centuries. For example: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Sri Lanka and South Africa. In recent years, Tea has has also been exported from Russian, Eastern Mediterranean and South American countries which are also represented withiin the population of UK. Since the introduction of drinking Tea to the UK over 400 years ago, Tea has played such a central part in the lives of communities. It has become a universal phenomenon with millions of people enjoying Tea on a daily basis to the extent that it has become hard to imagine a world without Tea. Tea has always accompanied and even influenced key historical events as well as supported economic, technological and cultural developments to take place. By bringing together diverse communities with an ancestral link to Tea within Rochdale, Manchester and Oldham this project will use Tea as a theme to get communities to focus on and discuss a common shared social and ancestral heritage. The subsequent stories will be presented in various formats that are accessible to those communities that have shared their stories as well as being shared with the wider population that has limited or no contact with communities linked to Tea. The sharing of stories will serve to educate, illustrate and highlight a common shared heritage as well as breaking down any perceived barriers that may exist.
