After extensive cake-eating, we mean research, our favourite afternoon tea for children in London is St. Ermin’s. The fancy-pants art nouveau hotel sits adjacent Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. In addition to renting rooms to humans, it’s also a hotel for 10,000 honey bees who live on the fourth floor roof!
The busy bee afternoon tea for children is posh and the food is honey-themed. You sit in a chic tea room at the top of two curving staircases on a theatrical balcony. The servers are almost comically solicitous. The finger sandwiches, cakes, and cookies come in a sunshine yellow bookcase with foil-wrapped chocolate bumble bees. The delights are made with honey from the hotel’s rooftop bee hives.
Once your Pooh Bears are really, really sticky and totally jazzed, you can take them upstairs to the glass viewing corridor to watch the honey bees do their thing. It’s quite special and memorable. Our two-year-old has busy bee tea mentionitis. The one year old is still bzzzzzzzing.
Fun facts: St. Ermin’s was a monastery until the 10th century. In the 1880s E.T. Hall designed a horseshoe shaped mansion block which became a hotel shortly thereafter. It was headquarters to WWII covert operations.
2 Caxton St, Westminster, SW1H 0QW, Marriott.com/hotels/travel/lonse-st-ermins-hotel-autograph-collection
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