OK - I did search for this in the archives but saw only brief mention of this in regards to etiquette.
I’m curious how the tradition of “English Tea Time” got started. When did this tradition begin? Why does it happen at 4:00 PM?
-Emo
Wasn’t always 4:00 necessarily; in fact, a French idiom for English-style afternoon tea is “le five o’clock”. Sez here that tea-drinking caught on in the Netherlands in the 17th century after Dutch traders started bringing the stuff back from the Far East, and the custom spread to England from there. Apparently the British originally considered it a “health beverage”, like drinking your wheatgrass juice today.
I have nothing further to contribute on this subject, except a brief hijack cautioning people not to mix up “afternoon tea” (the fancy kind with cucumber sandwiches and tea cake that generally takes place at 4:00, as you state) with “high tea” (a sort of informal supper including sturdy proletarian victuals like boiled eggs and sardines). The mistaken use of “high tea” to mean “afternoon tea” is the result of American commercial eateries trying to make their British-wannabe afternoon-tea events sound more upper-crust.
I think I am only exaggerating slightly when I say that English Tea Time with cucmber sandwiches at 16.00 went out of fashion soon after Oscar Wilde wrote ‘The Importance of being Earnest’.
In 1895. :eek:
Which, btw, was tomorrow (Feb. 14) at the St. James Theater in London.
English eating times:
0700-0900…Breakfast
0900-1200…Snacks
1200-1500…Lunch
1500-1600…Snacks
1600-1700…Dinner
1700-2359…Snacks.
snacks replaced “Tea Time”
You forgot ‘0400-0500 - snacks’.
As a matter of fact I usually have my Mars Bar drip hooked up to sustain me through the small hours
Not to mention second breakfast, elevensies, Luncheon, Afternoon tea, and Supper.
chowder, your dinner seems a bit early to me, I’d say it ‘officially’ goes to at least 1830, and I often eat later than that. And I’d usually call it tea, whilst dinner is a proper cooked meal at lunch time. Oh, and Sunday Lunch is normally eaten at tea time. 
The traditional answer - which may even be the correct one - is that afternoon tea, in the sense of a light meal at 4pm, was invented at Woburn in 1841 by Anna Stanhope, wife of the 7th Duke of Bedford.
But tea had been a fashionable drink in England since the late seventeenth century - the other traditional story being that it had been popularised by Catherine of Braganza - and the phrase ‘tea time’ as a time in the afternoon when tea was drunk dates back to the mid-eighteenth century.
If I have a meal in front of the six o’clock news, it’s tea. If it’s in front of Channel 4 news, it’s dinner. If it’s in front of the ten o’clock news, it’s a busy day and a takeaway.
depends where in England you live.
0700-0900…Breakfast
0900-1200…Snacks
1200-1500…Dinner
1500-1600…Snacks
1600-1700…Tea
1700-2359…Supper.
NB would normally have either tea or supper.
No such thing as ‘supper’ here. Not a meal, anyway. Possibly a late-evening snack. And dinner at lunchtime? How silly 
Where I live, it’s like this:
0700-0730…Breakfast
1100-1130…Elevensies
1300-1400…Lunch
1530-1600…Cup of Tea
1900-1930…Dinner
2000-2200…Cups of Tea
Oh, and if you’ve got a spare few minutes during the day, have another cuppa!
does no one else have supper? Do i come from a family of freaks? Northern phenomenon only?
“Supper” sounds terribly quaint to me, like something out of a nursery rhyme. And people don’t actually use the word “elevensies” do they?
OTOH, I do have enough northern roots to call the midday meal “dinner”, although that’s also what I’d call a more formal evening meal. Otherwise, that would be “tea”.
I’m from the south, where we have lunch in the middle of the day and dinner in the evening. It’s only “tea” if it’s eaten before 6pm.
We never had supper, unless it was a light snack later in the evening (usually after 9pm), so maybe it is a more northern kind of thing.
“Elevensies”, well that’s just when it’s halfway to lunchtime and I haven’t stopped for a cup of tea yet!
I see that One and Only Wanderers has already provided the correct Northern grazing times 
To confuse matters, the women who serve school lunches are called Dinner Ladies
And here in America, Dinner is solidly in the evening unless it’s Thanksgiving Dinner, which can start as early as 2 pm.
My south-of-England parents claim they once invited their north-of-England neighbours round “for supper”. The meal was prepared for around 8, but the neighbours never showed up. My parents, bemused, ate alone, and were thinking about writing the evening off and going to bed when the northerners showed up about 10.30pm, having already eaten a large meal, expecting to be given biccies, tea, and snacks.