Where Memories Meet: The Wateringbury Tea Room Hiding a Secret Well and a Treasure Trove of Antiques

At the crossroads in Wateringbury, where the A26 meets the road up to East Malling, there's a little pink-fronted shop that does two things at once rather well: it's a proper tea room, and underneath it, a sprawling antiques and vintage centre. It's called Where Memories Meet, and it's run by Carolyn and Joseph out of a Grade II listed building with a lot more history under its floorboards than you'd guess from the street.

The tea room takes its tea seriously - it's a self-declared "tea bag free zone," serving only loose-leaf and speciality teas, including petal teas like rose bud and chrysanthemum flower. There's espresso coffee too, freshly ground from an independent micro-roastery, alongside handmade cakes, fresh sandwiches, ciabattas and paninis that change with the seasons. The signature, though, is the cream tea - a scone with clotted cream, butter and strawberry preserve - and a full afternoon tea menu for anyone after something a bit more special, from £24.95 a head (there are gluten-free and prosecco options too, and bookings need 48 hours' notice).

Head down to the basement and the tea room gives way to an Antiques & Vintage Centre - more than 1,000 square feet of it, with prices ranging from a £1.50 vintage porcelain cake plate right up to serious collectors' pieces, including Art Deco Lalique and a Charles II elm coffer when we looked. They buy as well as sell, so if there's something gathering dust in your attic, it's worth an email.

The building itself dates to around 1800 and started life as part of a dairy. Older Wateringbury residents remember it later as an agricultural store, and since then it's done time as a general store, an antiques centre, a gym, an estate agent's and an engineering firm's office, before Carolyn and Joseph took it on. During renovation work, they discovered the building sits on a genuine spring-fed well, buried under twelve inches of concrete in the basement - a nod to Wateringbury's own geology, where the chalk of the Kent Downs meets a band of clay and forces groundwater up to the surface. It's the same spring line that once made the village a brewing centre: Wateringbury was home to two breweries, Phoenix and Kent, both of which only closed in the late 20th century.

Where Memories Meet is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, and Sundays 10.30am to 4.30pm (closed Mondays), at 188 Tonbridge Road, Wateringbury, ME18 5NS. Source: Where Memories Meet