The Horseless Carriage Exhibition, 1895
The WalkTW Building Files | The Chronicles
On 15 October 1895, a small group of Victorians gathered at the Tunbridge Wells Agricultural Showground to look at something almost nobody in Britain had seen before: a carriage that moved without a horse.
It was, by any reasonable definition, the first motor show ever held in the United Kingdom. It happened here, organised by the town’s own Mayor, more than a year before London held anything comparable. And then, having invented the entire concept, Tunbridge Wells promptly lost it to the capital and never got it back — a very familiar shape for a story on this site.
The Mayor Who Loved Machines
The exhibition’s organiser was Sir David Lionel Salomons — Mayor of Tunbridge Wells, electrical engineer, and a man whose enthusiasm for new technology ran well ahead of most of his contemporaries. Salomons owned his own Peugeot, imported from France and fitted with a Daimler engine — one of the very first cars brought into Britain at all. Rather than simply enjoy it privately, he decided the whole town should see what the future looked like.
He organised the Horseless Carriage Exhibition at the Agricultural Showground, assembling a genuinely remarkable collection for 1895: his own Peugeot; a Panhard-Levassor belonging to Evelyn Ellis, the first foreign-built car ever imported into Britain, which Ellis had driven — illegally, since the Red Flag Act still limited road vehicles to walking pace — from Micheldever to Datchet at an average of 10mph; a Daimler-powered fire engine; a handful of De Dion-Bouton tricycles; and a steam tractor for good measure.
To a Victorian public that had never seen a self-propelled road vehicle in the flesh, this was closer to a visit from the future than an afternoon out.
The Magazine That Was Born Reporting on It
The exhibition’s significance wasn’t confined to Kent. The Autocar — founded that same year and still published today as the world’s oldest surviving car magazine — covered the Tunbridge Wells exhibition in one of its very first issues. The coverage caused nationwide press interest in what newspapers were still calling “these newfangled motorised vehicles.”
For a brief moment, this small Kent spa town was the epicentre of British motoring.
And Then London Took It
The moment didn’t last. The following year, the newly formed Motor Car Club organised what became recognised as Britain’s first national motor show, in London — and the capital never looked back. Tunbridge Wells, having done the genuinely difficult work of proving the concept could draw a crowd and national press coverage, never hosted the flagship event again.
It is a very particular kind of local disappointment: not failure, exactly, but the specific frustration of building something first and watching somebody bigger take the credit. Readers of our Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells post will recognise the shape of the story.
The Town Kept Trying Anyway
What makes this story worth telling isn’t just the 1895 exhibition — it’s how persistently the town has kept returning to the idea ever since, at almost exactly the same interval each time.
In 1911, the Tunbridge Wells Motor Club was founded. Fifty years after Salomon’s original exhibition, in 1961, the Club marked the anniversary with a Second Horseless Carriage Exhibition on The Pantiles. Five years later, in 1966, a third exhibition was hosted by Donald Campbell—the land-speed record holder himself—and drew a crowd of over 12,000 people, a remarkable turnout for a town of this size.
Most recently, in 2025, the Royal Tunbridge Wells Festival of Motoring marked the 130th anniversary of Salomons’ original show, billed explicitly as the Fourth Horseless Carriage Exhibition. If you’ve been to a classic car event on The Pantiles recently, you’ve been standing in a tradition that stretches back, in an unbroken if irregular line, to a Mayor with a French car and a Daimler engine in 1895.
Building Files: The Facts
Location: Tunbridge Wells Agricultural Showground (1895 site); subsequent exhibitions held on The Pantiles
Date of original exhibition: 15 October 1895
Organiser: Sir David Lionel Salomons, Mayor of Tunbridge Wells
Significance: First motor show held in the United Kingdom
Notable exhibits: Salomons’ Daimler-engined Peugeot; Evelyn Ellis’s Panhard-Levassor, the first foreign-built car imported into Britain
Legacy events: Tunbridge Wells Motor Club (founded 1911); Second Exhibition (1961); Third Exhibition, hosted by Donald Campbell (1966); Fourth Exhibition / Royal Tunbridge Wells Festival of Motoring, 130th anniversary (2025)
This is the latest entry in the WalkTW Building Files — and the story behind entry seven in our Ten Things Tunbridge Wells Used to Do for Fun.
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