Thicker walked ceramic mugs are definitely common in the UK, and probably more common now than anything else, but me and my gran both agree that a proper cup of tea needs serving in a thin-walled, fine-china cup, like this: https://fegghayespottery.co.uk/product/plain-270ml-bone-chin...

In the States indeed these mostly look like bog standard coffee mugs. The tall one exists as a design but it’s rarer. I can’t speak for the OP but my experience is that media about Great Britain in America often depicts tea mugs as different (I’ve seen many shorter, smaller and flatter variants) than those mugs. Perhaps it is to highlight that the beverage is tea and not something else like coffee to the viewer.

Ok, thanks! That was a wide variety, and what you'd probably call a regular coffee mug here in Sweden.

But that is information too, that there is no true tall British tea mug.

Orwell's original essay says:

> one should drink out of a good breakfast cup—that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold—before one has well started on it.

So I suspect that "tall" is a byword for "not shallow".