You’ve walked past these places a hundred times. The Pantiles on a Saturday morning. The cricket ground on the Common. That moated house everyone’s been to for the maze and the dinosaurs.
What you may not know is that every one of these locations has, at some point, stood in for somewhere else entirely — a Victorian drapery, a fictional Hertfordshire estate, an American city, a Roman-occupied Britain, and the venue for India’s greatest cricketing triumph. If you’re deciding what to view, here are 10 Films and Shows to Watch This Weekend for inspiration.
This weekend’s homework: pick one from the list below, watch it, and then go stand in the actual spot. Sorted from oldest to newest, so you can watch Tunbridge Wells’ screen career unfold in order.
1. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) — Groombridge Place
Peter Greenaway’s strange, elegant murder mystery marks the beginning of Groombridge Place’s screen career. The country house is Groombridge Place, a 1655 moated house set in landscaped grounds, in Groombridge, four miles southwest of Royal Tunbridge Wells on the Kent/Sussex border. Anthony Higgins plays a draughtsman commissioned to draw the estate, who gets pulled into an “enigmatic murder plot” — and the gardens became so associated with the film that the Apostle Walk at Groombridge is now commonly known as the Draughtsman’s Garden.
Go see it: Groombridge Place gardens are open to the public from spring to early November.
2. Half a Sixpence (1967) — The Pantiles
The deep-cut classic. Half a Sixpence, based on H.G. Wells’s novel Kipps, is a musical starring Tommy Steele and directed by Golden Globe winner George Sidney. The Pantiles in Royal Tunbridge Wells is the set for Shalfords Emporium — the draper’s shop where Kipps apprentices.
Next time you’re getting a coffee on The Pantiles, you’re standing where a 1960s movie musical built a working Victorian shop window.
Go see it: The Pantiles, obviously. You’re probably there already.
3. Pride & Prejudice (2005) — Groombridge Place as Longbourn
The big one. ‘Longbourn’, the Bennet family home, is a moated manor house, Groombridge Place, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The crew transformed Groombridge into a bustling, shabby-chic Bennet home — building a duckboard bridge across the moat, altering windows, and filling the courtyard with geese, chickens and manure piles to give Longbourn its lively, lived-in atmosphere.
Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet grew up, fictionally, four miles from Royal Tunbridge Wells. Austen describes Longbourn as “a comfortable house, though not handsome” — Groombridge’s charm and lived-in authenticity captured that perfectly.
Go see it: Same gardens as #1. The geese are (probably) gone.
4. Darkest Hour-adjacent honourable mention — skip ahead, this one’s Westerham
(Editorial note: Chartwell is just outside our patch, in Westerham — close enough that it keeps coming up in searches, but not actually a Tunbridge Wells location. We’re not including it because we’d rather give you ten that are real than pad the list. Onwards.)
4. The Day of the Triffids (2009, BBC) — Groombridge Place
Groombridge Place’s third screen credit, and its strangest. Groombridge Place was used as a filming location for the 2009 BBC production of The Day of the Triffids. A genuinely menacing post-apocalyptic thriller about carnivorous plants taking over Britain, filmed partly at the same moated manor that played Jane Austen’s family home four years earlier.
The contrast is the entire point. Same gates, same moat, same gravel drive — one year it’s the Bennets having tea, the next it’s the last survivors of civilisation barricading themselves in against killer vegetation.
Go see it: Same gardens as #1 and #3. At this point, you should probably just buy a season ticket.
5. The Royals (2016-2018) — Tunbridge Wells area
The Royals (2016-2018) is noted by the Kent Film Office as a recent production to have filmed in the Tunbridge Wells area. This was an American E! network drama imagining a fictional version of the British royal family — meaning an American show about fictional British royals was, at some point, filmed in the one English town with “Royal” actually in its name.
We don’t yet know the specific locations used. If you remember crew vans or filming notices around town in 2016-2018, the WalkTW archive would love to hear from you.
6. Queens of Mystery (2020-2021) — Tunbridge Wells area
Queens of Mystery (2020-2021) is listed by the Kent Film Office as a recent production filmed in the Tunbridge Wells area. A gentle, Sunday-night murder mystery series set in a fictional English seaside town — exactly the kind of cosy crime drama where a Georgian spa town would make a perfect backdrop.
Again — specific locations not yet confirmed. Watch carefully and see if anything looks familiar.
7. Britannia, Series 3 (2021) — Claremont Gardens and Town Hill Road
The genre swerve of the list. During filming, the production visited Tunbridge Wells to film short scenes in Claremont Gardens and Town Hill Road. Britannia is a big, blood-soaked historical fantasy about Roman Britain and warring Celtic tribes — David Morrissey, druids, prophecy, the works.
Somewhere in Claremont Gardens or on Town Hill Road, a scene depicting Roman-occupied Britain was filmed within walking distance of the station. Look at those streets differently next time.
Go see it: Claremont Gardens and Town Hill Road are both public — walk past and see if you can guess what they stood in for.
8. This Way Up, Series 2 (2021) — Speldhurst
The “wait, that’s near here?” entry. This Way Up Series 2 (2021), created by and starring Aisling Bea, alongside Sharon Horgan and Tobias Menzies, used Tunbridge Wells in Kent as a filming location. The strikingly modern home featured in the opening episode of series two — where Shona settles into her fiancé Vish’s “super sleek” home while he’s away in New York — is in real life in the village of Speldhurst in Tunbridge Wells, designed by London architecture firm Architecturall.
An ultra-modern architect’s house in a Kent village, standing in for the kind of glossy London apartment that only exists in TV. The gap between “rural Speldhurst” and “the flat of someone’s tech-millionaire fiancé in London” is doing a lot of work here.
Go see it: Privately owned — admire from the road, don’t knock.
9. ’83 (2021) — Nevill Cricket Ground
The most unexpected entry on this list, by a distance. ’83, directed by Kabir Khan and starring Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, is a major Bollywood film about India’s 1983 Cricket World Cup victory, and used Nevill Cricket Ground in Tunbridge Wells as a filming location. (Oxford Reference)
One of the biggest Indian films of recent years — a national sporting triumph, one of the most celebrated moments in Indian cricket history — recreated, at least in part, on a ground in Hawkenbury, on the southern edge of Tunbridge Wells.
The choice of location isn’t random. The Nevill Ground’s only One Day International was, fittingly, a 1983 World Cup group match between India and Zimbabwe — the game in which Kapil Dev scored an extraordinary 175 not out. (Kirkus Reviews) If you’ve ever played a club match at the Nevill, you’ve stood on a ground with a genuine claim to 1983 World Cup history — which is presumably exactly why the Bollywood crew chose it.
Go see it: Nevill Ground, Nevill Gate, Warwick Park, TN2 5ES — about a mile south of the town centre, near Hawkenbury. Home of Tunbridge Wells Cricket Club, with matches most summer weekends.
10. Tuesdays and Fridays (2021, Netflix) — Danemore Park
The most recent entry, and the grandest house. Danemore Park is a Grade II listed Georgian country house in 80 acres, with a stable block, woodland and a long driveway, in the district of Royal Tunbridge Wells, and was used for the Netflix film Tuesdays and Fridays.
A Georgian country house within the borough, on Netflix, released in 2021. If you’ve got a Netflix subscription and a free evening, this is the newest addition to TW’s screen CV.
🗺️ The WalkTW Weekend Challenge
Three of these are genuinely visitable: Groombridge Place (four separate productions across nearly forty years), The Pantiles (you’re there already), and Nevill Cricket Ground (turn up to a match).
If you watch any of these and spot something else — a street, a shopfront, a bit of garden you recognise — let us know. The Royals and Queens of Mystery entries on this list are still open cases. WalkTW would love to close them.
The pattern worth noticing: Groombridge Place alone has played a Georgian family home, a murder-mystery estate, Sherlock Holmes’s Birlstone Manor, and the last refuge from carnivorous plants — sometimes within a few years of each other. The same gates, the same moat, completely different worlds. That’s not a bad metaphor for Tunbridge Wells itself.
#TunbridgeWells #WalkTW #FilmingLocations #GroombridgePlace #PrideAndPrejudice #ThePantiles #WeekendWatchlist #HiddenTunbridgeWells
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