WalkTW

Tag: architecture

Stories about the buildings, structures, and architectural heritage that shape the character of Royal Tunbridge Wells.

  • THE OLD WEST STATION

    THE OLD WEST STATION

    A Building File: 1 Linden Park Road

    Building Files, Issue 4

    This post is part of the Railway War series. Start with Part 1 (1845–1923) and Part 2 (1940–present) if you’re coming to this fresh.

    There is a building on Linden Park Road that has spent 160 years confusing people about what it is supposed to be.

    It arrived in 1866 as a railway station, the LBSCR’s triumphant answer to the SER’s existing terminus half a mile away. It closed in 1985 when British Railways decided the line wasn’t worth keeping. It became a Beefeater. Then a pub. Then a Wild West steakhouse with nine hotel rooms named after South American tribes and a large decorative jail that you can book for parties.

    The building, for its part, has said nothing. It just stands there — red brick, round-arched windows, three-storey clocktower with a pyramidal roof and a louvred cupola — looking exactly as it did when the first LBSCR train pulled in on 1 October 1866. Which is, depending on your mood, either deeply reassuring or faintly absurd.

    The Building Itself

    Before we discuss what has been done to it, it is worth pausing on what it actually is.

    A detailed architectural illustration of a newly completed Victorian railway station, October 1866. The building is two storeys of red brick with ashlar dressings and black brick detailing, a ten-bay centre block with a gable-fronted wing to the west and a three-storey clocktower to the east. The clocktower terminates in a pyramidal slate roof with a louvred cupola and weathervane above. Nine round-arched windows run across the ground floor, connected by a decorated ashlar impost band. Horse-drawn cabs wait on the forecourt. A small crowd of Victorian passengers with luggage stand at the entrance. The building radiates civic confidence — this is an architect who knew exactly what he was doing. Clean line illustration with warm watercolour wash, golden afternoon light.

    Tunbridge Wells West station was designed by Charles Henry Driver, an engineer’s architect whose credits include the ornamental masonry of the Thames Embankment, the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, and the Crystal Palace aquarium. He was, in short, someone who understood how to make a functional structure look considerably more important than strictly necessary.

    The building he gave Tunbridge Wells in 1866 reflects that instinct entirely. The facade is two storeys of red brick with ashlar and black brick dressings, arranged across a ten-bay centre block with a gable-fronted wing to the west and a three-storey clocktower to the east. The ground floor carries nine round-arched windows and an arched doorway, connected by a decorated ashlar impost band that runs the full width of the building. The eaves are serrated, with an ashlar cornice on foliated brackets. The clock tower terminates in a pyramidal slate roof, above which sits a louvred cupola with a weathervane.

    Inside, the original booking hall featured a panelled ceiling, a three-bay, columned arcade, and four gas-lit ticket windows. It was, in every sense, a statement building — the LBSCR making unmistakably clear that it had arrived in Tunbridge Wells and intended to stay.

    Historic England listed it Grade II on 27 March 1986, approximately ten months after the last train departed. The listing came just in time.

    What Happened Next

    The building’s post-railway life has proceeded in three acts, each successively stranger than the last.

    Act One arrived in the late 1980s, when the main building was converted into a Beefeater restaurant called The Old West Station. The name was apt — it is the Old West Station — though one suspects the Beefeater marketing department was gesturing at cowboys rather than Victorian railway geography. The booking hall, with its panelled ceiling and stone columns, became a dining room. The arched windows looked out over the car park where the platforms used to be.

    A slightly melancholy interior illustration of a Victorian railway booking hall converted into a Beefeater restaurant, circa 1988. The original panelled ceiling is visible above, the three-bay columned arcade still frames the room, and the four original ticket windows are now partially obscured by a laminated menu board. Rows of red-upholstered booths fill the floor where the ticket queues once stood. A waiter in a burgundy uniform carries a mixed grill. One diner looks up at the ceiling with a faintly puzzled expression, as if wondering what the room used to be. The comedy is gentle, not cruel. Warm interior light, slightly faded palette — the aesthetic of a Sunday evening in 1989.

    Act Two followed when Herald Inns and Bars purchased the building and continued operating it as a pub-restaurant under the same name. The Cowboys remained notional.

    Act Three began in 2009, when Smith & Western moved in. They are a chain of American-themed steakhouses with Wild West decor, banjo music, and a menu running to ribs, burgers, and fajitas. They have leaned into the theme with total commitment. There is a saloon bar. There is a decorative jail available for private hire. The nine hotel rooms are named after South American tribes, which is a geographically inventive touch. The restaurant’s own website describes the building as “a historic landmark brought back to life,” which is one way of putting it.

    The Awkward Question

    Here is where this Building File has to say something honest, even if it is not entirely comfortable.

    Wild West decor in a Grade II listed Victorian railway station is, on the face of it, a jarring combination. Driver’s building was conceived as a piece of civic architecture — a public gateway to a prosperous town, with the proportions and detailing to match. Filling it with cowboy hats and country music is not, by any conventional standard of heritage, a sympathetic use.

    A quietly pointed editorial illustration of the interior of a converted Victorian railway station now operating as a steakhouse. The panelled ceiling soars above — richly detailed, historically significant, entirely ignored. Below it, four tables of diners eat burgers and ribs, all looking down at their plates or phones. One small child at the far table is the only person in the frame looking upward, pointing at the ceiling. On the wall behind the bar, a blank rectangle of painted plaster sits where an interpretation panel might one day go. Warm amber restaurant lighting. The illustration's emotional register is not angry — it is wistful. Painterly editorial style.

    Furthermore, the context is particularly pointed in Tunbridge Wells. The station building sits directly beside the Spa Valley Railway — a preservation society that spent eleven years fighting to bring the line back, that operates steam trains through the High Weald on volunteer labour, that named itself TWERPS with cheerful obliviousness. One half of the site is a labour of love. The other half serves nachos.

    And yet.

    The alternative — which was very real in the late 1980s, when the building stood derelict, and the Sainsbury’s bulldozers were active next door — was not a sensitively curated heritage centre with educational panels and a gift shop selling LBSCR tea towels. The alternative was a building with no income, no maintenance budget, and no one with a financial incentive to care whether the roof held.

    Adaptive reuse is how most Victorian buildings survive. Those that do not find commercial use tend not to survive at all. Churches become apartments. Pumping stations become nightclubs. Railway hotels become offices. The question is never whether the new use is architecturally ideal — it rarely is — but whether the building is being maintained, whether its structural fabric is intact, and whether the people who walk through its doors can still read the original building clearly if they look up.

    On those terms, the Old West Station is doing reasonably well. The exterior is well-maintained. The nine round-arched windows are still in place. The clock tower still stands above Linden Park Road as it has since 1866. The panelled booking hall ceiling — the one that was lit by gas when the LBSCR first opened the doors — is still there above the tables.

    What It Owes the Town

    There is, however, one thing that adaptive reuse does not automatically provide, and which the Old West Station has so far largely declined to offer: a readable connection to its own history.

    A building this significant — designed by the architect of the Thames Embankment, built as the centrepiece of a Victorian railway war, the scene of the final passenger departure in 1985 and the subsequent eleven-year preservation battle — deserves more than a passing mention on a restaurant website. It deserves an interpretation panel in the entrance. A framed history on the wall of the booking hall. Something that tells the people eating their fajitas where they actually are.

    This is not a radical demand. It costs very little. Moreover, it is arguably good for business — a story this good makes the building more interesting to visit, not less. However, as things stand, the Wild West theme is the narrative, and the Victorian railway history is the backdrop.

    The driver’s building has survived a bomb, a closure, a supermarket next door, and four decades of commercial tenants. It is still standing. That matters enormously. But standing is not the same as being understood — and a building in the middle of Tunbridge Wells, with this much history in its walls, deserves to be both.

    The Building Files is a WalkTW series exploring the hidden histories of Royal Tunbridge Wells’s most interesting addresses. The Smith & Western is open seven days a week at 1 Linden Park Road, TN2 5QL. The Spa Valley Railway departs from the platform directly behind it.

  • The WalkTW Building Files — Corn Exchange – Issue 2 🏛️🔍

    The WalkTW Building Files — Corn Exchange – Issue 2 🏛️🔍

    The Building That Broke the Law by Existing

    The Corn Exchange, 49 The Pantiles, Royal Tunbridge Wells, TN2 5TN is also known for being the historic Corn Exchange building at Pontiles Tunbridge Wells.

    Walk south along The Pantiles on any summer afternoon. Pass the Chalybeate Spring, pass the coffee shops and the collonaded walkway. Stop when you reach the building with the statue on the roof.

    Look up. She’s been there since 1844 — Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and harvest, standing on a parapet flanked by cornucopias, scythe in hand, looking out over The Pantiles with the expression of someone who has seen everything and is mildly amused by most of it.

    The Historic England listing describes her simply as “a statue of a female figure with scythe and sheaf of corn.” However, she is considerably more interesting than that. She is watching over a building that began its life as a theatre, hosted two of the greatest actors in British history, straddled a county border, and was — at one point — technically in two different counties simultaneously.

    The Corn Exchange is not what it appears to be. In fact, it never has been.

    How a Fairground Performer Built a Theatre on The Pantiles

    Sarah Baker was an illiterate fairground performer who became one of the most successful self-made women of her time. Born in 1737, she grew up travelling the country with her mother and younger sister, entertaining crowds at country fairs and race meetings. In the early 1770s, recently widowed and with three young children, she took over the small family troupe.

    In the face of fierce opposition from male rivals, she began building a theatre empire across Kent. It was not until 1789 that Sarah — well into her fifties by then — opened the first of what she described as her “great grand” Kentish theatres in Canterbury. She went on to build three more purpose-built theatres in the county: Rochester in 1791, Maidstone in 1798, and Tunbridge Wells in 1802.

    All four were built to the same plan and similar dimensions, to allow for scenery to be easily moved between them. As a result, Sarah ran what was effectively a theatrical touring circuit across the entire county — moving actors, sets and costumes between four identical buildings, each playing to a different Kent audience.

    The Tunbridge Wells theatre cost her approximately £1,600 to build. It officially opened on 8 July 1802, designed in the neoclassical style, built in brick with a stucco finish, and featuring a symmetrical main frontage of three bays facing onto The Pantiles.

    That original frontage is still exactly what you’re looking at today.

    The Stage in Sussex, The Audience in Kent

    Here is the detail that belongs on every heritage trail in this town and is on none of them.

    The Corn Exchange was built in 1802 over the Grom Brook, which carried the county boundary between Kent and Sussex. As a result, the actors on the stage would perform in Sussex while the audience watched from Kent.

    Think about what that means in practice. Every actor who walked onto that stage stepped from Kent into Sussex. Every entrance was a county crossing. Every exit was a return to England’s garden county. The audience, meanwhile, sat in Kent and watched people perform in a different county entirely.

    Before the alteration of the county boundary, the theatre had the stage in Sussex and the auditorium in Kent. It later became the Corn Exchange. In 1894, however, the administrative boundary was redrawn to encompass the entire expanding town. Under the Local Government Act 1894, the boundary between the Administrative County of Kent and the Administrative County of East Sussex was moved two miles south, incorporating the entirety of the growing town.

    Therefore, the county-straddling stage disappeared not because anything about the building changed, but because a government act moved the border. The theatre didn’t move. England simply redrew itself around it.

    The Actor Who Left Town Ahead of a Mob

    The actors Edmund Kean and Charles Kemble both performed on the stage in the building in the first half of the 19th century. In addition, the plaque on the wall outside confirms this plainly. However, the plaque does not mention what happened next.

    Edmund Kean went on to become arguably the greatest Shakespearean actor of the 19th century. He was one of the greatest of English tragic actors — a turbulent genius noted as much for his megalomania and ungovernable behaviour as for his portrayals of villains in Shakespearean plays.

    Before all of that, however, he was a young actor in Mrs Baker’s company at Tunbridge Wells. He joined Mrs Baker’s company in Tunbridge Wells and spent a year there. Furthermore, he probably would have stayed longer, except he found himself in trouble with a townsman — he had seduced the man’s wife — and was forced to leave just ahead of a vengeful mob.

    The man who would later be described by Coleridge as watching his acting being “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning” left Tunbridge Wells one step ahead of an angry husband. He then went to Gloucester, met a woman called Mary Chambers, married her, and eventually became the most celebrated actor in England.

    The stage where all of this began is now an antiques market. However, the frontage is unchanged. Next time you walk past, note the three neoclassical bays, the fluted Doric columns at the porch, and the parapet above. That is exactly what Edmund Kean saw when he first arrived — and rather hastily when he left.

    From Theatre to Grain Market to Antiques

    After Baker died in 1816, the theatre passed to her son-in-law, William Dowton. However, audiences dwindled, and the theatre closed in 1843.

    In consequence, the building became a corn exchange — a market where grain was bought and sold. The corn exchange conversion was completed, and the building reopened in November 1844 by John Nevill, 3rd Earl of Abergavenny, whose seat was at Eridge Park. Furthermore, it was at this point that the Ceres statue appeared on the roof — the Roman goddess of grain, finally appropriate to the building’s new purpose.

    For a century, therefore, the building that Sarah Baker built as a theatre sold wheat. Then it became a Tourist Information Centre. Finally, it is today an antiques and fine art market — Grade II listed, officially designated on 20 May 1952.

    However, the interior you see today is not entirely original. The building was extensively reconstructed in 1989. As a result, the original theatrical interior — the stage, the auditorium, the boxes where Georgian audiences watched performances in a different county — is gone. What remains is the 1802 frontage, unchanged and still facing The Pantiles.

    What the Plaque Doesn’t Tell You

    There is a green plaque on the wall. It reads, accurately, that this was formerly the Tunbridge Wells Theatre, built in 1802 by Sarah Baker, that Edmund Kean and Charles Kemble performed here, and that the stage was in Sussex while the auditorium was in Kent.

    However, it doesn’t mention that Sarah Baker was illiterate. She reputedly never learned to write more than her name, yet when she died at Rochester in February 1816, just months before her eightieth birthday, her estate was estimated at more than £20,000 — equivalent to well over £1.5 million today.

    Furthermore, it doesn’t mention that Edmund Kean left the building toward an angry mob. It doesn’t mention the county boundary running beneath the stage, or the Grom Brook that carried it. It doesn’t mention that the woman watching from the roof has been standing there since 1844, long before anyone now alive was born, watching everything that happens on The Pantiles with the patient attention of someone who has absolutely nowhere else to be.

    🗺️ Go Find It Today

    The Corn Exchange is at 49 The Pantiles, TN2 5TN — on the south side of the Lower Walk, impossible to miss. Look for Ceres on the roof. The green plaque is on the wall to the right of the entrance.

    The antiques market inside is open most days. Therefore, this is the one Building File entry where you can walk around inside the building freely — browsing furniture and vintage prints on the site of a stage that was once in a different county.

    Meanwhile, if you want the full Sarah Baker picture, the Theatre Wars post and the Theatre Queen of The Pantiles cover the remarkable story of how she built her empire in much more detail.

    🕵️ The Open Questions

    Three things the WalkTW archive cannot yet answer:

    Question 1: The Grom Brook. The county boundary ran along the Grom Brook, which flowed beneath the building. However, where exactly is the Grom Brook today? It has clearly been culverted — built over, diverted underground — at some point between 1802 and the present. Does it still flow beneath The Pantiles? Does anyone know where it goes?

    Question 2: The Mob. Edmund Kean left Tunbridge Wells ahead of a vengeful townsman whose wife he had seduced. The sources confirm this. However, they do not name the townsman, the wife, or the street. Does any local record — newspaper archive, diary, parish record — fill in the gap?

    Question 3: The Original Interior. The 1989 reconstruction removed the theatrical interior entirely. However, before it was reconstructed, did anyone photograph the original auditorium? Was there anything left of the Georgian theatre inside by 1989 — original boxes, gallery ironwork, backstage machinery? Does anyone know what was lost?

    Drop what you know in the comments. The Building Files are open. 👇

    The WalkTW Building Files continue. Next up: the hotel on The Pantiles where a young woman leapt from a window, a ghost has been throwing furniture in Room 16 since at least 1997, and the building itself has been watching the promenade since before Tunbridge Wells was Royal.

    #TunbridgeWells #WalkTW #BuildingFiles #CornExchange #ThePantiles #SarahBaker #EdmundKean #LocalHistory #HiddenTunbridgeWells