Tchai Ovna: Not Just For Hippies!

The following, by Allan Brown, was published in the last Sunday Times Ecosse section (there’s no direct link, as the Times’ site is an unholy mess):

If there’s one thing worse than hippies, it’s hippies with a grievance — a state that rather goes against the spirit of being a hippie in the first place, I’d have thought. But such is the case at the Tchai Ovna tea room in Glasgow’s west end, where the teas come from exotic lands and have names like Condor’s Mucus. The place is about to have a development of flats built in its vicinity, provoking a hippie threat to occupy nearby trees in an effort to slow the bulldozers.

“This is about more than just a bunch of hippie tree-huggers trying to stop the builders,” said the owner Martin Fell, overlooking the obvious fact that it’s precisely about hippie tree-huggers trying to stop builders. “We employ 15 people and our business is under threat. It’s not just about us. The council has given planning permission to the developers, showing utter disregard for the democratic process and the wishes of the community.” The wishes of the community have been expressed, he adds, in a 500-signature petition, with the added support of the bands Franz Ferdinand and Belle & Sebastian. Not that this development threatens Tchai Ovna’s property. Rather, says Fell, it will limit the light that gets to the tea room’s garden.

So, to get this straight, 22 families are to be denied attractive new homes so that the Mama Cass memorial lupins can grow proud and tall. And to prevent this, the hippies are prepared to damage surrounding trees by squatting in them and scratching them with their tambourines and those little bells attached to the bottom of their trousers. This is truly far-out logic. Mugs of Condor’s Mucus all round.

What a wrong-headed, pathetically prejudiced load of old cock!

Okay, so hippies are annoying. But when hippies set up a tea shop selling some 200 teas from across the world - and I really mean across the world, the owners travel across Europe and the Far East to get their stock, hence the ‘silly,’ over-literally translated names for the teas - in a beautiful setting on the banks of the River Kelvin, with a wonderful secluded garden outside and a cosy-but-scruffy room inside, I think I can forgive them for having long hair and interesting beards. And, when the council give them less than a week’s notice to challenge planning permission, then proceed to use the Labour group’s block vote to make it impossible for the decision to be countered, I think I can forgive them for getting angry about having their livelihoods taken from them.

And what’s this rot about depriving families of homes? The only people to benefit from the development are the developers, and the speculating landlords who will snap up flats so they can charge extortionate rents to, no doubt, young, childless professionals.

As for the question of light in the garden - a valid concern in itself, for me as a customer - the real issue is not that the ‘Mama Cass memorial lupins’ will wilt, but that, with light blocked by a tower block, and months of noisy construction, even the most diehard Tchai Ovna devotee will find it impossible to drink there in peace. And the tea shop will go out of business. Leaving fifteen people on the dole.

So, to get this straight, Brown would rather see a small number of people cash in at the expense of 15 long-term jobs made possible by the sort of entrepreneurship organs like the Times usually applaud? And, to get this straighter, he’d rather see a tower block than a beautiful wee garden? And, let’s be ruler-straight about this, he’d rather see 22 yuppies bag themselves a riverside apartment than see hundreds of Glaswegians enjoy and benefit from a tea shop that, to be perfectly frank, is the best fucking place in the West End, tea shop or otherwise? Far-out logic indeed!

Sadly, Brown’s inanities are neither here nor there - the loss of Tchai Ovna looks inevitable - but if Martin Fell and the other workers at the tea shop want to protest, they’re well within their rights to do so, and the last thing they need is to be undermined by some sniffy hack so far out of touch with the community he is meant to serve that he can’t, erm, see the wood for the trees, and would rather make a few cheap cracks at the expense of the world’s easiest target (daft old hippies) than help save a place that makes the West End a place worth living in. (That’s the ultimate irony here: creating homes while destroying the very culture that makes those homes so desirable!)

So, if you live in Glasgow and are passing Otago Lane, do drop in to Tchai Ovna for a cup of tea (go with a pot of White Monkey rather than the Condor Mucus) and I’ll bet that within five minutes, you’ll be signing their petition and pledging to help stop the developers in any way you can. Unless, of course, you’re Allan Brown, seemingly the only person to ever cross the threshold without falling in love with the place.

Posted at 6pm on 21/07/04 by Jack Mottram to the news category.
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Tags: glasgow, politics, rants