The British tradition of afternoon tea is enjoying a renaissance. Sales of speciality teas are growing at record rates, there are two-month waiting lists for afternoon tea at London’s top hotels, and a new chain of high street tearooms is set to open.

William Gorman, executive director of the Tea Council, said that women between the ages of 20 and 40 were leading a boom in tea drinking. He said: “We drink 165 million cups of tea per day, as a nation, compared with 70 million cups of coffee, but 90 per cent of tea is drunk in the home. The market is ripe for a new, public, tea venture.”

The waiting list for afternoon tea at the Ritz has reached eight weeks for weekend sittings and the hotel now has five sittings a day. Profits at Bettys, the northern chain of teashops, have soared, while sales of its speciality teas are up 10 per cent. But there are few places on the high street that specialise in serving tea.

Now one British firm is fighting back against the coffee shop chains. Hope and Greenwood, a husband-and-wife partnership, is planning a national chain of 1950s-styled outlets, where the tea is loose-leaf and “fancy" coffee is banned.

The couple have formed a joint venture with Ponti’s, the restaurant chain, to create the British Tea Rooms. The first outlet will open on Marylebone High Street, in the West End of London, in September. The company plans to open 50 British Tea Rooms nationally in the next few years.

Kitty Hope, one half of Hope and Greenwood, said that the cafés will be “very British and very nostalgic”. She said: “I think there are too many coffee chains. You go to a coffee place and you get a horrible cup with a tea bag in it. Then you have to add your own milk. It’s horrid. It doesn’t give tea the respect it deserves.”

“You can go to the Berkeley [Hotel] for tea at one end of the market, or to a greasy café, but there’s very little in between.”

Mick Nash, managing director of Sedley Place, the firm that will design the tearooms, said that he hoped to replicate the spirit of the late 1950s, when the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told Britons they had “never had it so good”. Mr Nash said: “It’s going to be genuinely British.”

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