Catherine Cranston

Catherine Cranston (27 May 1849 – 18 April 1934), widely known as Kate Cranston or Miss Cranston, was a leading figure in the development of tea rooms. She is nowadays chiefly remembered as a major patron of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald, in Glasgow, Scotland. The name of Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms lives on in reminiscences of Glasgow in its heyday.

Her father, George Cranston, was a baker and pastry maker and, in 1849, the year of her birth, he became proprietor of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Chop House and Commercial Lodgings at No. 39 George Square in Glasgow city centre. The hotel was renamed the Royal Horse, then renamed again in May 1852 to become Cranston's Hotel and Dining Rooms, offering:

Her slightly older brother Stuart (1848–1921) became a tea dealer and, according to Glasgow in 1901, was "a pioneer of the business" there of "tea shops pure and simple" who by 1901 had three such tearooms offering nothing more substantial to eat than a sandwich. Kate went on to create much more of a social facility.

Like other cities in the United Kingdom, Glasgow was then a centre of the temperance movement which sought an alternative to male-centred pubs. Tea had previously been a luxury for the rich, but from the 1830s it was promoted as an alternative to alcoholic drinks, and many new cafés and coffee houses were opened, catering more for ordinary people. However it was not until the 1880s that tea rooms and tea shops became popular and fashionable.

Although she was known professionally as "Miss Cranston", Kate married Major John Cochrane, an engineer, and Provost of Barrhead in 1892.

The couple lived in a semi-detached villa in Carlibar Road in Barrhead. As a wedding gift, John commissioned a redesign of the principal rooms by architect and interior designer George Walton, the brother of the well-known artist E A Walton. Some years later, they moved to a much larger mansion house called "Househill" in the nearby village of Nitshill. This time, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was commissioned to re-design the interior in 1904, and the completed house became known as Hous'hill.

John died at sixty years old on 22 October 1917 in Barrhead after a short illness. Kate retired from public life, sold off her tea rooms and other businesses, and was said to have worn black thereafter in memory of him. They had no children, so when she died in 1934, she left two-thirds of her estate to the poor of Glasgow. She is buried with her husband and his family in Neilston Cemetery.

In 1878 Miss Kate Cranston opened her first tearoom, the Crown Luncheon Room, on Argyle Street, Glasgow. She set high standards of service, food quality and cleanliness, and her innovation lay in seeing the social need for something more than a restaurant or a simple "tea shop", and in putting equal attention into providing amenities designed in the latest style. Her first tearoom was decorated in a contemporary baronial style. On 16 September 1886 she opened her Ingram Street tearoom and in 1888 commissioned George Walton to decorate a new smoking room in the Arts and Crafts style in one of her tea rooms.