When walking into the Westminster Tea Rooms time stands still.
The stained glass windows, the debonair waiters in coattails greeting you at the door, the sound of Glen Miller and Billy Holiday ringing in your ears. The restaurant in Southport brings a sense of Victorian civility to Lord Street.
Set up by Raymond Blundell with his wife Debbie, you would think the Westminster Tea Rooms had been passed down through the generations. However, it was only set up 19 years ago and was originally a chicken shop.
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Ray told the ECHO: "I had a job with certain hours and my wife had a job with certain hours so we never saw each other. We wanted to set something up where we worked together. So we decided to bring back what has been lost.
"Table cloths, silver pots, afternoon tea stands, and a standard of service that had drifted away over the years. This was not set up to make money, it was so I could work with my wife.
"When we first got the place it had the menu on the walls like McDonald's and fast food tables. When we ripped everything out, even the landlord did not recognise the place."
Ray who was a chauffeur before venturing out on his own said he came up with the idea after visiting the grand hotels in London like The Ritz and The Dorchester. That sense of style and class is what Ray wanted to emulate.
Ray who is from Netherton said: "I love the fact people come in here and time stops. You leave your worries on the doorstep it is civilised.
"We get a lot of people coming in here who have dementia and they don’t know what day it is, or their name but they will sing every word of a song and they go back eighty years. The place brings back memories.
"We get the people who come in the old clothes who look the part. Their hair is brylcreem-ed and they have the suit on, we love that about the place."
Ray said that while the chandeliers and paneled wood draw people's eye it is his wife's cooking that keeps people coming back and the secret to the restaurant is its customers.
He said: "It is cilivlised again, we don’t have Wi-Fi in here and it is not the kind of place where you sit on the phone and the food is homely.
"It's the customers and the staff that make it so special. That is what keeps us going and that is what we set it up for, to provide a great service for people, who understand the past."
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