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 four centuries, this town has organised entertainments ranging from elegant to genuinely peculiar, some of which still happen every year, and some of which have vanished so completely that even the local historians researching them can only shrug and say, essentially, “well, that’s what the record says.”
Here are ten of them, roughly in the order the town invented them.
1. Camping on the Common (1606 onwards)
Before there was a town, there was a season. The earliest visitors to the newly discovered spring had nowhere to stay, so they simply pitched tents on the Common and camped there for weeks at a time — a tradition that, as covered in The Queen Who Slept in a Tent, even the Queen of England participated in personally in 1630. It wasn’t intended as entertainment. It became the town’s founding social ritual anyway.
2. Beau Nash’s Organised Season (from 1735)
Once permanent buildings existed, someone needed to organise what happened inside them. Beau Nash, already running Bath’s social calendar, extended his authority to Tunbridge Wells, imposing a structured season of assemblies, subscription balls, and strict etiquette on the town’s wealthy summer visitors — just up the road from the newly built Church of King Charles the Martyr, the town’s first permanent building. Entry to the assemblies was restricted to “respectable families” within a twenty-mile radius, enforced by a Master of Ceremonies whose job was, essentially, controlling access to fun. It was the same theatrical social world covered in our Capital of Infidelity series.
3. Gaming Rooms and Coffee Houses
For those not dancing at the assemblies, the alternative entertainment was cards, dice, and conversation, conducted nightly in the town’s coffee houses and gaming rooms — the less respectable cousin of Nash’s formal balls, and considerably more lucrative for the house.
4. Donkey Riding Along Church Road
By the 1820s and 30s, one of the town’s most reliable entertainments was considerably gentler: donkey rides through the streets, a pastime enjoyed by visitors of every age, including a young Princess Victoria, whose own donkey — named Flower — is the subject of The Princess and the Donkey.
5. Cricket on the Common (from 1782)
The oldest continuously practised entertainment on this list. The first recorded cricket match on what’s now Higher Common Ground, near Wellington Rocks, took place in 1782. Kent County Cricket Club used the ground throughout the nineteenth century, and Linden Park Cricket Club still plays there today — a tradition now comfortably into its third century.
6. The Circus on the Common (Edwardian era)
By the early twentieth century, the Common hosted something considerably wilder than cricket: a travelling fair and circus, complete with wild animals and fairground attractions. It’s a genuinely strange image to reconcile with the same green space where sedate cricket matches and donkey rides had been the norm for over a century — proof that Edwardian Tunbridge Wells had a taste for spectacle that its Victorian predecessors might not have entirely approved of.
7. The Horseless Carriage Exhibition (1895)
On 15 October 1895, Mayor Sir David Salomons organised what is now recognised as the first motor show ever held in Britain, at the Tunbridge Wells Agricultural Showground. It featured some of the earliest cars ever imported into the country and caused nationwide press interest. The following year, the national show moved to London and never returned — but the town has quietly revived the idea every few decades since, most recently in 2025 for the 130th anniversary. Read the full story →
8. The Suffragette Fire at Nevill Ground (1913)
Not every tradition was cheerful. In April 1913, the cricket pavilion at Nevill Ground — built just a decade earlier at a cost of £1,200 — was destroyed in an arson attack generally attributed to militant suffragettes. It’s a stark reminder that the Edwardian calm this town projects in old photographs concealed a genuinely turbulent political moment, playing out on the very grounds where cricket had been quietly continuing for well over a century.
9. Sedan Chair Races and “Scandals at the Spa” (1990s)
The 1990s brought a wave of new Pantiles events, the best of which deserve to be far better known: Sedan Chair races, held every August, alongside a five-day Georgian reenactment festival called “Scandals at the Spa.” Both events leaned deliberately into the town’s theatrical eighteenth-century reputation — the same reputation covered across our Capital of Infidelity series — turning genuine history into a summer spectacle for a modern audience.
10. The Christmas Torchlight Procession (1990s)
Each December, a torchlit procession once made its way from The Pantiles to the Town Hall for the switching-on of the Christmas lights — a tradition remembered fondly by residents old enough to have taken part, and gradually replaced in more recent years by the Pantiles ice rink and Christmas market that now do the same job with rather less fire involved.
What This Tells You
Look at the list end to end, and a pattern emerges. Tunbridge Wells has never actually been the sedate, disapproving town of national reputation — it has spent four centuries inventing reasons for people to gather, dress up, race, gamble, watch wild animals, or simply camp out on the Common because there was nowhere else to go. Some of these traditions ran for three centuries. Others lasted a decade. All of them say considerably more about the town’s real character than the Disgusted letters ever did.
This post sits alongside our other traditions-and-oddities pieces in The Dandy Chronicles. If you know of a forgotten Tunbridge Wells tradition that deserves a place on this list, WalkTW would love to hear about it.
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