Category: Society, Scandal & Culture

Social patterns, rivalries, romance, community and identity across Royal Tunbridge Wells’ history.

Two Families, One Wedding, Two Very Different Endings

What Happened to the Aristocrats Whose Names Are Still on Your Street Signs In our last Chronicles piece, A Fossilised Property Register, we told you that Camden Park and Nevill Park are named after in-laws — the Marquess Camden’s family… Read More →
A Fossilised Property Register

What Tunbridge Wells’ Grandest Street Names Are Really Telling You Walk from Camden Park to Nevill Park, and you have, without realising it, walked through a wedding. Most people assume the poshest streets in any English town are simply named… Read More →
Ten Things Tunbridge Wells Used To Do For Fun

The Dandy Chronicles | The Chronicles A Short History of the Town’s Forgotten (and Not-So-Forgotten) Traditions Every town accumulates traditions the way a coat accumulates pockets — some useful, some strange, most eventually forgotten. Tunbridge Wells is no exception. Over… Read More →
Quitely, On Our Terms

The Chronicles. This series explores the experiences of LGBT people in Tunbridge Wells, highlighting local stories and perspectives. One Man, One Facebook Group The story begins three years earlier and considerably more quietly. In 2021, a man named Dan Rogers… Read More →
The Waters Were Always Queer

The word “queer” is older than its current meaning. Before it became a term of identity — reclaimed, debated, eventually claimed — it simply meant sideways. Odd. Not quite fitting the expected shape of things. It described anything that resisted… Read More →
The Town That Banned a Piano

This is a piece of Tunbridge Wells LGBT history that has never appeared in any official account of the town. In the summer of 1974, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality applied to Tunbridge Wells Borough Council for permission to hold… Read More →
The Town That Didn’t Know Itself

An Introduction to Three Stories About Royal Tunbridge Wells and Its Queer History The Chronicles There is a version of Royal Tunbridge Wells that everyone knows. It is tweedy, it is conservative, it is faintly outraged by most things, and… Read More →
10 Films and Shows to Watch This Weekend — All Secretly Filmed in Tunbridge Wells

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… Read More →
The Russians Who Never Left: Tunbridge Wells Best-Kept Secret

Stand on St Luke’s Road, TN4, on a Saturday morning. Look at the Victorian brick church on your left. Note the Church of England noticeboard. The familiar English parish signage. The entirely unremarkable, entirely ordinary appearance of a building that… Read More →
The “Grand Tour” of Heartbreak

If Part 1 taught us anything, it’s that the Georgian elite didn’t just visit Royal Tunbridge Wells to “take the waters”—they came to completely rewrite the rules of romance. Enterprising builders gave them double staircases and overlapping balconies to hide… Read More →