Consumer Editor Emma McKinney discovers how tea, cake and crafts are on the menu at tearooms popping up around Birmingham in a bid to end the city’s blight of empty shops.

A GROUP of inquisitive passers-by wander into a Birmingham shop, lured in by a sign on the front door promising free tea and cake.

They almost look set to retreat, their faces bewildered, until Samina Zahir gives them a friendly welcome and offers them a cuppa.

Visibly perplexed, Vernon Roger asks the question the others around him seem reluctant to ask.

“Is the tea and cake really free?” he says, nervously.

Yes, it is, explains Samina with a knowing smile, for it’s not the first time, and almost certainly will not be the last, she will be subjected to such cynicism.

“I’m not surprised people ask whether it’s free,” she says with a smile. “It’s not often in life you get something for nothing.”

But that’s exactly what the Inhabit tearoom in Grove Lane, off Soho Road, Handsworth, is offering – and refreshments are not the only thing on the menu.

Those brave enough to take a tentative step over the threshold of the store will also be offered a chance to get creative, designing teaspoons, decorating furniture or learning photography skills.

For this is no ordinary tearoom. This is a pop-up tearoom, set up as part of a project called Inhabit, aimed at reinvigorating the high streets of some of the city’s suburbs left wounded by the recession.

With almost 18 per cent of Birmingham’s shops boarded up and empty, the city has the 13th highest rate of vacant stores in the country – a trend the Government both locally and centrally is keen to reverse. With this in mind, Birmingham City Council invited organisations to come up with ideas to rid the high streets of empty shops.

Samina’s research and social enterprise firm Hybrid left council bosses impressed with its ‘pop- up tearooms’ idea and the company clinched £52,000 from the Department of Communities and Local Government to fund the initiative.

The basis of the project, which runs until March, is that the tearooms are temporary, opening for around two months at a time in locations around the city.