Carriages of Cambridge
Capability Barns • Huntingdon Road • Fen Drayton • Cambridgeshire CB24 4SD
carriagesofcambridge.co.uk • +44 1954 233 279
This wonderful venue is just outside Cambridge, and the short drive is well worth taking in order to enjoy a truly amazing, brilliantly themed afternoon tea. As visitors arrive, the first thing they see is a huge old barn, beautifully restored and reworked as the reception area for afternoon-tea guests and the main office of Michael Attle’s building supplies company, Bannold, supplier of every type of material (pebbles, cobbles, rockery, barks, mulches, paving stones, etc.) required for creating memorable gardens and outdoor spaces. The beautifully landscaped gardens around the barn have been designed to show what can be done with all those components, so there are water features, wooden and stone sculptures, paved pathways, and what appears to be the ruins of a gothic chapel or abbey—all created by Michael.
And as visitors continue to explore, they come to an old streetlamp bearing a blue sign with a white arrow and the word “STATION” and, alongside it, a road sign saying “STATION ROAD”. Follow the sign, and there at the end of the path is a real 1920s railway station, with ticket hall, waiting room, platforms, a signal box and signals, genuine old railway benches for passengers to sit on while waiting for a train, and on the platform, a tidy pile of old leather suitcases and some milk churns waiting to be picked up and delivered to a dairy somewhere up the line. Stationary between the platforms are three impeccable vintage 1920s train carriages that date back to the days of steam and first-class luxury travel.
Michael’s idea to create Carriages was inspired by a visit he once made to a restaurant in an old colonial railway station in India. After his trip, he was offered and bought an old station platform. Then came a signal box; a 1920s station house and flagstones for the platform, the open hearth, and clock for the waiting room; and all the vintage items Michael needed to create an authentic British railway station. The carriages all have names. Louis formed part of the train that carried the body of the late Earl Mountbatten of Burma from Waterloo to Romsey on the 5th of September 1979 after his funeral in Westminster Abbey in London. Oliver is named for Oliver Cromwell, who was born in Huntingdon near Cambridge in 1599 and became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in the 17th century between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II. And Lancelot was named in honour of Lancelot Capability Brown, the famous English landscape architect who is buried in the nearby Parish Church of Fenstanton.
From Tuesday to Saturday, Lancelot welcomes morning visitors to coffee, tea, and cakes, while Louis and Oliver host two sittings of afternoon tea at noon and 3:30 p.m. The menu includes finger sandwiches and scones, pretty cakes and macarons baked fresh in the small kitchen carriage that stands on the rails next to Louis. A smaller option is the cream tea with scones, jam or lemon curd, and Cornish clotted cream. As an alternative to all that sugar, choose the Carriages’s savoury cream tea, which includes warm cheese-and-chive scones served with chilli jam and sour cream. Two large Victorian glasshouses and an old-fashioned kitchen garden to the side of the station provide many of the afternoon-tea ingredients, while other food items are sourced as much as possible from local farmers, so that everything is fresh and just bursting with flavour.
Everyone who works here is so friendly and helpful, and every single impressive detail—from the immaculate station area, the authenticity of the waiting room and ticket office, the background sound effects in the carriages that give the impression that the train is moving, the steam that billows out from under the carriages, the 1920s and 1930s music playing quietly while tea is served, the white, Art Deco porcelain teawares and Deco-styled teaspoons— everything has been thoughtfully and lovingly planned to create this stunning treasure of a tea experience.
