Chimps, strings and pyramids
The PG Tips many people remember is not just a tea. It is also the chimpanzee adverts, which ran until January 2002 and at times used celebrity voices including Peter Sellers, Donald Sinden and Bob Monkhouse. It is PG Tags too, launched in 1985 as tea bags with a string for mug use, a small convenience that felt strangely modern at the time. Then came the tetrahedron-shaped Pyramid Bags in 1996, promoted as giving the tea leaves more room to move. British tea history often sounds like a parade of minor domestic engineering, but that is rather the point. PG Tips kept changing the bag while trying not to disturb the main national arrangement: tea should taste like tea, and it should arrive quickly.
From Pre-Gest-Tea to PG Tips
The brand began earlier than the adverts and bag shapes. PG Tips was launched by Brooke Bond in 1930 under the name Pre-Gest-Tea. The name suggested it could be drunk before eating as a digestive aid, which feels wonderfully of its time and also like something modern labelling rules would look at over its spectacles. Grocers and salesmen shortened it to PG, and after the Second World War, regulations ruled out describing tea as helping digestion. By around 1950 to 1951, the PG name had been formally adopted. The “Tips” part was added to point to the top two leaves and bud of the tea plant used in the blend, a neat bit of naming that survived long after the digestive claim was quietly shown the door.
Manchester behind the mug
Behind PG Tips sits Brooke Bond, the tea business associated with Arthur Brooke. Brooke was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1845, and opened his first teahouse at 23 Market Street in Manchester in 1869. That Manchester setting matters, not because every cup needs a geography lesson, but because the city was a serious centre of trade, buying, selling and blending in the period when tea became woven into daily British routine. The Brooke Bond factory at Trafford Park, near Manchester, has been linked with PG Tips production since 1930. Corporate history tends to polish things until they squeak, but this part is pleasingly practical: a northern tea business, a factory, and a product made for households that expected the tea tin to be refilled before anyone had to raise their voice.
The modern packet and the family tree
The name on the box today carries a fairly tangled family tree, as British grocery brands often do. Brooke Bond merged with Liebig in 1968 to become Brooke Bond Liebig, and the business was later acquired by Unilever in 1984. PG Tips is now manufactured by Lipton Teas and Infusions, a company formed as a spin-off from Unilever in 2021. None of that means the modern owner invented PG Tips, and it would be daft to pretend otherwise. The useful way to read the packet is this: PG Tips began as a Brooke Bond tea from the Manchester world of tea blending, became a household name through decades of adverts, cards, bags and mugs, and now sits within a newer tea company structure. The tea cupboard, meanwhile, remains deeply uninterested in boardroom diagrams.
Why it follows people overseas
For British shoppers in Canada, PG Tips Decaf is less about novelty and more about continuity. It is the sort of box that reminds people of grandparents’ cupboards, office kitchens, student houses, late-night toast, and family parcels with tea bags tucked in beside biscuits because someone back home knew the local supermarket would not quite do. Decaf has its own quiet role in that ritual: the evening brew, the second mug, the “I know I said I was going to bed” mug. In Halifax, Toronto, Calgary or wherever the kettle is stationed, it offers the familiar PG Tips shape of home without the caffeine making a nuisance of itself. A sensible closing thought from The Great British Shop: some groceries travel because they are fancy, and some because people would simply rather not explain themselves to a disappointing cup of tea.
