From pyramids to quick-brew squares
PG Tips has had more bag-shaped drama than most teas. Its tetrahedron-shaped Pyramid Bags were launched in 1996, promoted as a way to give the tea leaves more room to move about. In 2023, the brand introduced a quick-brew square tea bag designed to brew in 60 seconds, replacing the pyramid bags. PG Tips has also said it was the first UK tea brand to achieve Rainforest Alliance certification, a claim usually attached to the wider brand rather than to one particular box on the shelf. Packaging changes come and go, but the point has remained fairly simple: a strong, familiar mug of black tea without having to conduct a tasting panel in the kitchen.
Before PG was PG Tips
The story behind the name is wonderfully odd in the way old grocery names often are. PG Tips began in 1930 as a Brooke Bond tea called Pre-Gest-Tea. The name suggested it could be drunk before eating as a digestive aid, which sounds very much like the sort of thing that would not survive modern labelling rules. It did not. After the Second World War, regulations ruled out that sort of digestive claim, and by 1950 to 1951 the shorter PG name had been formally adopted. The “Tips” part was added to refer to the top two leaves and bud of the tea plant used in the blend, giving the modern name its slightly clipped, practical British sound.
Manchester, Brooke Bond and the business of tea
PG Tips came through Brooke Bond, the tea company built from Arthur Brooke’s Manchester beginnings. Brooke, born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1845, opened his first teahouse at 23 Market Street, Manchester, in 1869. That does not mean he personally sat down and invented your modern tea bag, of course. Grocery history loves to tidy everything into one heroic sentence, and real life is usually messier. What is clear is that Brooke Bond became a major British tea business, and the Brooke Bond factory at Trafford Park near Manchester has long been tied to PG Tips production. Manchester mattered: it was a city of trade, transport, warehouses and practical commerce, which is about as fitting a birthplace for a national tea habit as one could ask for.
The adverts Britain somehow remembers
For many people, PG Tips is not just a tea brand, but a set of half-remembered television moments. In 1956, the brand began using anthropomorphic chimpanzees in television adverts, later known as the Tipps family. Those adverts ran for decades, with celebrity voices including Peter Sellers, Donald Sinden and Bob Monkhouse. By modern standards, they belong firmly to a different era, but they lodged themselves in British popular culture all the same. Then there were Brooke Bond collector cards in tea packets from the 1950s into the 1990s, covering wildlife, history and all sorts of worthy subjects that somehow ended up in kitchen drawers. Tea, education and mild clutter: very British.
Why it still matters in Canada
For British expats in Canada, PG Tips Original is not just black tea in a box. It is the remembered shape of a weekday morning, the office brew round, the grandparents’ cupboard, the corner shop shelf, the tea you knew before you had opinions about tea. In Halifax, Toronto, Calgary or a kitchen halfway through a Nova Scotia winter, putting the kettle on can feel like a small act of continuity. Not grand. Not sentimental in a waving-a-flag sort of way. Just a mug, a familiar name, and the comforting knowledge that some household decisions do not need improving. The Great British Shop is happy to leave it at that.
