"Back in 2018/19 my friend and I were on maternity leave with our eldest children, and would often meet in these tea rooms and enjoy lunch, probably once a month or so, and loved it here. We are on maternity leave again and thought it would be nice to return with our second babies. I can only say there must have been a change in management since we used to go, as we were made to feel unwelcome almost instantly. I arrived first, with my 10 month old in a pram. I was greeted by a woman who asked how many people I needed a table for. I told her it would be me, but daughter, and my friend and her baby coming. The woman asked me if that meant there would be another pram, I said yes, to which she sighed straight away and made it clear she was not happy. Soon after this my friend turned up and we both suggested we could leave the prams somewhere out of the way, we were both told there was nowhere out of the way to put them… I saw plenty of places, and even where we were sat had plenty of room once the surplus chairs were removed. We were not offered high chairs for our little ones, we had to ask. Whilst we were eating I admit the babies did make a bit of a mess on the floor, as they dropped a bit of their food…but this is what babies do. The food was around their high chairs, it hadn’t been thrown across the room, or in the path of anybody else, it was just around the bottom of their high chairs. We of course had every intention of cleaning this up ourselves, we were just planning on waiting until we had finished eating to do so…however the same woman made remarks about the mess on the floor so unfortunately my friend and I felt obligated to interrupt our lunch and constantly clean up…. Don’t get me wrong if it seemed as if we were intending to leave without clearing the mess I would absolutely expect the staff to say something, I just feel that they could have let us enjoy our lunch before making comments to make us feel uncomfortable. In hindsight alarm bells should have rung when it was clear arriving with prams was a problem, I wish we had chosen another place to go that was a bit more baby friendly. We won’t be making that mistake again. A shame really as the food was lovely, and the tea rooms are a beautiful, quaint setting to have lunch, but the service did let it down I’m afraid."
