The WalkTW Building Files🏛️🔍
A Note Before We Begin
Every WalkTW story so far has followed a person — a writer, a mathematician, a Russian baroness, a playwright — and used the buildings of this town as their backdrop (Thackeray’s window. Cumberland’s playwright. Defoe’s promenade.). In this piece, however, we’ll turn our attention to an event: The Battle of Little Mount Sion. The buildings were always there, waiting patiently in the margins.
This is the series where the buildings get their turn.
Tunbridge Wells is 400 years old. That is 400 years of people living, arguing, dying, drinking, conspiring and occasionally dropping dead of shock inside the same walls. Some of those walls are still standing. Some of them are on streets you walked past this morning without a second glance.
The WalkTW Building Files is a new series — one building per post, investigated properly. Confirmed history, contested claims, rumours that won’t go away, and at least one question that nobody has yet managed to answer. Each post comes with directions, because the whole point is that you can go and stand in front of the building yourself and see what history has left behind.
We start where Tunbridge Wells itself started — on the hill above the Chalybeate Spring, in the oldest streets in town, where two pubs have been arguing about the same thing for four hundred years.
The Compasses, 45 Little Mount Sion, TN1 1YP, and
The Grove Tavern, 19 Berkeley Road, TN1 1YR
They face each other across a quiet backstreet in the oldest part of Tunbridge Wells. Two small pubs, forty metres apart, both claiming to be the oldest buildings in town. Both with beams, open fires and ghost stories. Both have reasons to doubt the other’s claim.
The Compasses is owned by Greene King and will tell you its history on a laminated card. The Grove Tavern is owned by its landlord and will tell you its history if you ask nicely and stay for a second pint.
Between them, they contain more of Tunbridge Wells’s original character than almost anywhere else in the town. The question of which one is older may never be settled. The more interesting question is why nobody is properly asking it.
The Hill Before the Town
To understand Little Mount Sion, you need to understand what it was before Tunbridge Wells existed.
When Lord North stumbled upon the Chalybeate Spring in 1606, there was nothing here — no town, no streets, no buildings. Just a spring in a field, two forested ridges on either side, and the ancient track between them. Tunbridge Wells was something of an artificial creation in the early to mid-17th century. Initially, there were no houses or hotels, just the spring, some shops, coffee houses and perhaps a pub or two in the area now called The Pantiles. Residential development only really started in the 1690s on Mount Sion and Mount Ephraim.
But before that formal development, before the lodging houses and the Assembly Rooms and the paving scandal, there were encampments. Visitors to the spring in the earliest decades pitched tents and temporary structures on the hillsides. And where there are encampments, there is always, eventually, somewhere to drink.
Those two ridges — Mount Sion and Mount Ephraim — were not neutral territory. If you have read our Mountain Feud post, you already know that the two hills were engaged in a cold war of competing religious and political identities throughout the 17th century. Mount Sion was Puritan, Parliamentarian, Nonconformist. Mount Ephraim was Royalist, Anglican, and fashionable. Little Mount Sion sat squarely in Puritan territory.
One of the first buildings on Mount Sion was an ale-house, which is now the Grove Tavern. That claim comes from the Tunbridge Wells Civic Society — not from the pub’s own marketing. It is as authoritative as anything in the historical record.
The Compasses, forty metres away on the same hill, says the same thing about itself.
The Name That Greene King Doesn’t Mention
The Greene King laminated card tells you the pub has had many names over the centuries — Compasses, Compasses Hotel, Compasses Inn, Three Compasses, Compasses and Horseshoe, Hogshead and Compasses.
What it doesn’t tell you is what it was called before all of those. Searching in the local library reveals that it used to be called The Goat and Compass, which is a very strange name. However, when you dig deeper, you discover that it was originally an inn called God Encompasseth Us — a reference to the Bible’s view of God surrounding or encompassing his people, found in Psalm 139:5 and Hebrews 12:1-2.
Think about what that tells you. The earliest inn on this hill — in the 1630s, at the height of the Mountain Feud between the Puritan Mount Sion and the Royalist Mount Ephraim — was named after a Puritan scripture. God Encompasseth Us. This was a Puritan drinking house, on a Puritan hill, at a moment when the two ridges of Tunbridge Wells were engaged in a cold war of competing religious identities.
The pub was, from its very beginning, a theological statement. It just gradually shortened its name until nobody remembered what it meant.
The Night Mrs Pek Dropped Dead
The Greene King card contains a story sourced from the Annual Register of November 1789 that deserves to be far better known than it is.
The landlady at the time was a Mrs Pek. One evening, a turner called Fenner — believed to be related to William Fenner, one of the best-known makers of Tunbridge Ware — and a carpenter called Philpot were drinking together at the pub. A quarrel arose between them, which proceeded to blows. The fight went on for some time.
The sight of the brawl so greatly affected Mrs Pek that she dropped dead. Although she was given medical help immediately, it was fatal.
But here is the detail that elevates this from a pub fight into something stranger. When news of Mrs Pek’s death was relayed to a Mr Field at Mount Ephraim — about half a mile away, who was a relative of the deceased — the shock was so great that he dropped dead too, while the story was being related to him.
Two people died as a direct result of a carpenter and a turner having an argument in a Tunbridge Wells pub in 1789. One of them was half a mile away when it happened. This is documented in the Annual Register. It is real. The next landlord, a Mr D. Schooler, also died at the inn in 1803.
The Exorcist, the Little Girl and the Angry Spirit
At some point in the pub’s history, one landlord had an exorcist attend, due to what the card describes only as “some activity.” The Compasses is said to be haunted by the spirit of a little girl who allegedly died on the premises. Her mother — described in the card as a prostitute — was murdered by her father on the same site.
Witnesses report shadows moving around the ground floor, sudden cold spots, the feeling of someone breathing over their shoulders, whispering in their ears. One member of staff has seen the ghost of a woman wearing a white coat-like garment.
Soul Searchers Kent, a paranormal investigation team, investigated the pub after receiving a call from the landlord. One ghost hunt ended when an angry and aggressive spirit shouted “Get out” at the paranormal team.
The paranormal team left.
Whether the spirit was the little girl, the murdered mother, the deceased Mrs Pek, the late Mr Schooler, or simply a Greene King customer who had been waiting too long for their food is not recorded.
This is not, incidentally, the only violent history on this street. The Capital of Infidelity series has already established that Georgian Tunbridge Wells ran on assignations, gambling and the management of appearances. The backstreets of Mount Sion were where the less respectable ends of that economy operated. Little Mount Sion was never quite as genteel as it looked.
Across the Street: Josh in the Cellar
While The Compasses accumulates its catalogue of deaths, exorcists and aggressive spirits, the Grove Tavern, forty metres away, has been quietly conducting its own supernatural affairs with rather more specificity.
The Grove Tavern was originally known as Brett’s boarding house, Chapel House, and the Grove in Mount Sion. The Brett family had extensive land holdings in the area. Later, the tap house was no doubt added to quench the visitors’ thirst.
The ghost at the Grove Tavern has a name. The ghost reported to be haunting there is named Josh. The owner reported that he was a former cellar man waiting for his lady to come through the tunnel to the cellar for a clandestine meeting.
This detail requires unpacking. Legend states that tunnels ran beneath Little Mount Sion and other areas of the town. One is said to have led from a house across the street to the cellar of the Grove Tavern, and this house was one of ill repute. The gentlemen of the inn would greet ladies of the night there or even in the tunnel for some discreet meetings.
This puts Josh firmly in the same world that Daniel Defoe documented when he rode into town in 1722 and noted the “gaming, sharping, intriguing” with the eye of a man who had seen everything. The tunnels beneath Little Mount Sion were, apparently, part of the infrastructure of that intriguing.
Josh, the cellar man, is still waiting. The tunnel presumably still exists beneath the street, whether blocked or forgotten. The house of ill repute across the road is now something else entirely. The lady never arrived. Josh has been in the cellar since the 17th century.
The Grove Tavern is Grade II listed. Its listing was granted on 7 June 1974. English Heritage saw fit to protect this building. Nobody mentioned Josh in the paperwork.
The Grove Behind the Compasses
One detail from the Greene King card that connects both pubs to the wider history of the hill: behind The Compasses was the old Grove Park, where visitors to the spa would take their strolls after dining or listen to the orchestra on the bandstand, which is no longer there.
That same promenading culture — the performance of respectability over a private reality of gaming and assignation — runs through the entire Capital of Infidelity trilogy. The Georgian visitors who strolled in Grove Park after dinner were the same people conducting their less reputable business in the tunnels beneath the street. Tunbridge Wells has always been very good at holding both in balance.
The bandstand is gone. The grove is gone. The spa visitors are gone. The orchestra is gone. The tunnel may or may not still be there.
What remains: two small pubs, forty metres apart, still arguing about which one is older, on a hill that has been continuously occupied since before Tunbridge Wells had a name.
The WalkTW Verdict on the Oldest Pub Question
Honest answer: We cannot settle it. The historical record is genuinely ambiguous.
The Compasses has the more documented paper trail — the 1718 ownership record, the Annual Register account, and the multiple name changes that suggest continuous operation over centuries. The name God Encompasseth Us anchors it to the very earliest years of the town’s development.
The Grove Tavern has the more credible origin story — Brett’s boarding house predating the formal development of Mount Sion, the Civic Society’s assessment that it was one of the first buildings on the hill, the Grade II listing that formally recognises its historic significance.
One of the first buildings on Mount Sion was an ale-house, which is now the Grove Tavern. But there may have been places on The Pantiles that we would consider pubs, too.
The honest answer is that the question of the oldest pub in Tunbridge Wells may have no clean resolution — because the town itself grew too gradually and informally in its earliest decades to leave the kind of paper trail that would settle it definitively.
What we can say with confidence: both pubs are on the oldest surviving street in Tunbridge Wells, in buildings that have been serving drinks since the town was new, forty metres apart, and both are worth your time.
🗺️ Go Find Them Today
Both pubs are on Little Mount Sion — the quiet backstreet running parallel to the High Street, five minutes from the station and two minutes from The Pantiles. Walk up from the Chalybeate Spring, turn left past the Church of King Charles the Martyr, and you will find them facing each other across the street.
The Compasses — 45 Little Mount Sion, TN1 1YP. Greene King pub, food served, family friendly, open fires in winter. The laminated history card is on display inside. Ask about the exorcist.
The Grove Tavern — 19 Berkeley Road, TN1 1YR. Independent, no food, proper real ale, dog friendly, one bar. Steve Baxter has been a landlord since 2003 and knows the building better than anyone. Ask about Josh.
Visit both in the same afternoon. The pubs are forty metres apart, and the beer is better at the Grove. The ghost stories are better at The Compasses. Order accordingly.
🕵️ The Open Questions
Three things the WalkTW archive cannot yet answer:
Question 1: The Tunnel. Does the tunnel beneath Little Mount Sion still exist? Is it blocked, bricked up, forgotten, or still accessible from somewhere? The Grove Tavern’s cellar presumably connects to something. Has anyone looked?
Question 2: The Little Girl. The Greene King card says the researchers are currently unable to locate any children living at the inn in the historical record, but will keep researching. Has anyone found her? A child dying on licensed premises would have generated a coroner’s record, a newspaper report, something. Does anyone know where to look?
Question 3: The Original Name. God Encompasseth Us is the most extraordinary pub name in Tunbridge Wells history. When exactly did it change, and why? Was it a deliberate secularisation as the town’s Puritan character faded? Was it simply worn down by generations of drinkers who couldn’t be bothered with the theology? The local library apparently has the records. Has anyone checked?
Drop what you know in the comments. The Building Files are open. 👇
The WalkTW Building Files continue. Next up: the building on The Pantiles where a stage crossed a county border, a Ceres statue watches from the roof, and the ghost of a Georgian actress may or may not be taking a curtain call in the antiques market below.
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