The family who run the pub were milling about, half working, half communing on this bright Sunday morning. Mum and son discreetly oversee the smooth running of the egg tureen and baguette guillotine and daughter-in-law arrives with a little girl. They’ve been to ballet lessons and the tiny one is keen to show off what she’s learned, pirouetting in the sunlight while the breakfasters look on, smiling indulgently. Ahh.
Breakfasted, I venture into Tunbridge Wells proper. The underground car park is as horrible as underground car parks the world over but this has a uniquely unpleasant feature in that the Pay and Display machine does bad impressions. As your ticket emerges from its innards, you get a nasty burst of Frank Bruno (‘Know what I mean, Harry’) or Del Boy (‘Luvvly jubbly!’), suggesting that the machine has been here since 1986. How odd then that no one has set about reducing it to fragments with a lump hammer. As it is, the smartly dressed lady before me in the queue merely raises her eyebrows and turns on her Russell and Bromley heel.
Tunbridge Wells has a lot of such ladies, young and old. They roam the streets, the older ones swathed in Nicole Farhi, Hobbs and Monsoon, the younger ones slightly brittle-looking and blingish in designer sunglasses that probably cost the price of a second-hand car. Not that any of the ladies in town this Saturday afternoon here drives a second-hand car, I think, as another Mitsubishi 4x4 rolls by down the high street. Looking around at the townsfolk I am reminded of a remark the Dutch photographer and film director Anton Corbijn made about his first meeting with Joy Division. Coming over from Holland to Manchester in the late 1970s, what struck him about the young band was how pale and skinny they looked, their clothes thin, their complexions sallow, a stark contrast to the well-fed Dutch with their comfortable welfare and social provision and healthy economy. In Tunbridge Wells, the people seemed taller and healthier than their counterparts on the streets of Manchester, Birmingham or Wigan, three places I know well.
I’m not surprised. The town has a general air not of stifling conservatism but rather of handsome, confident prosperity. The streets are broad and rising, surprisingly steep for those of us who think that south of Birmingham Britain becomes a bowling green. At a table in Carluccio’s window, a woman in big shades and elaborate jewellery picks at some olives and reads the Telegraph. A poodle, maybe hers, lies disconsolate and bored in the doorway, head on paws. The shops speak of discreet affluence: Bang and Olufsen, Russell and Bromley, Habitat. Sadly the Quirky Turkey appears to have closed down. Perhaps there is no call here for left-field poultry sandwiches. Absentmindedly I end up making a phone call outside a posh ladies’ clothes shop and attract the attention of a posh and very nice lady coming out.
‘Are you from the north?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I answer a little hesitantly, worried that she might be about to ask me to dig her some coal. But no.
‘I was born in Scarborough,’ she replies. ‘What’s it like up there these days?’
I tell her that I can’t vouch for Scarborough but the rest of us do nothing but go to the ballet and design websites and, gratifyingly, she laughs as she walks away down the sunlit street.
BBC Kent has its studios in the shopping arcade and, as is the fashion these days, you can see right in. As a radio presenter, I’m not keen on this. It’s a workplace after all and I don’t expect butchers, dressmakers or lathe turners to be on show in a goldfish bowl. Besides, what if I’ve got my feet up and am having a snooze during ‘Stairway to Heaven’? Anyway, in the studios of BBC Kent this fine afternoon, two young guys are singing and thrashing furiously at guitars. Who knows? Maybe this will prove to be their big break. I pop into the museum, as is my wont, and am instantly confronted with the most disturbing thing I have ever seen in such a genteel place, a display cabinet filled, for surely no good reason other than to terrify, with really scary old dolls. Clearly dating from the early days of doll production and before they’d got the hang of it, it is a distressing parade of glassy eyes, shapeless bodies and grotesque distorted features. Nearby is a case containing the stuffed remains of Minnie the Lu Lu Terrier (‘a much-loved pet’), another unpleasant encounter, and one that reminds me of the wisdom of the title of Alan Alda’s autobiography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed.
An Australian couple join me and look on with horror but are clearly too polite to say, ‘What in God’s name is this all about?’ Instead, with the easy geniality of their tribe, they tell me they are staying at the Hotel Du Vin. ‘How’s the food?’ I ask, in memoriam Richard Harris, but they haven’t eaten there. ‘One more week to go,’ they say and seem genuinely sad to be leaving our funny damp little island. Predictably, the weather has been ‘up and down…but we’ve had a seven-year drought at home so we could do with some of your rain.’
Back out on the streets, the elegant women come and go, the tall children, the Mitsubishi 4x4s, the poodles and the tourists, shopping and lounging in the town’s ambience of sweet propriety, its shelves laden with brogues and hi-fis, its bistros overflowing with polenta.
And it is all a lie. For the real story of Tunbridge Wells is one of depravity and wickedness. Not for nothing was this town called ‘the most debauched town in England’ by the Puritan diarist Roger Morrice. For great swathes of its history, Royal Tunbridge Wells was certainly more disgusting than disgusted.
Take a stroll around the town and you’ll notice a plethora of street and place names evoking the Bible. There’s a Mount Pleasant and a Mount Ephraim (where the infamous Judge Jeffries of the Bloody Assizes once lived). But the reason they are so called is not to reflect the upstanding nature of the citizenry, but quite the opposite. It was to deflect and obscure the town’s bad reputation, which is all tied up with its heyday as a spa.
One day in 1606, a young nobleman, Dudley, Lord North (why do posh people never have regular names?), was staying in the area and languishing in poor health due to the excessive and dissolute lifestyle and general overindulgence at the court of James I, of which he was an enthusiastic member. Riding along what is now Eridge Road, he noticed some funny Tango-coloured liquid coming up out of the ground, which he recognised as a chalybeate spring like those at the continental resort of Spa, famous for their supposed health-giving properties. He slurped a mouthful (obviously – I mean, who doesn’t drink orange water coming out of the ground when they spot it?), began to do so regularly, was cured of all his ailments and started a fashion for the stuff.
A hundred years later and the place was in full swing as a hip resort, patronised by royalty (hence its full name) and popular with the early-eighteenth-century glitterati. One contemporary account talked of ‘music playing all the time; and the ladies and gentlemen divert themselves with raffling, Hazard, drinking of tea and walking till two, when they go to dinner. In the afternoon there are the bowling-greens for those that love that diversion; and on those greens are balls four times a week for the young people; and where any gentleman may dance if he pleases. At night the company generally returns to the shops on the Walks, where is all manner of play till midnight.’
The town became the haunt of rakes and courtesans and scandal engulfed it. Like Bath and Epsom but more so, Tunbridge Wells became a spot where the beautiful people could hang out and let down their hair – as well as other things – away from the constraints of London society. It had a curiously classless and liberal vibe. Daniel Defoe said of Tunbridge Wells, ‘Here you may have all the liberty of conversation in the world, and any thing that looks like a gentleman, has an address agreeable, and behaves with decency and good manners, may single out whom he pleases, that does not appear engag’d, and may talk, rally, be merry, and say any decent thing to them; but all this makes no acquaintance, nor is it taken so, or understood to mean so.’ As far as I can see, all of this is simply a seventeenth-century version of the old rock and roll maxim, ‘What goes on tour, stays on tour.’
In much the same way that the opening of a new London members’ club will lure away the idlers and rakes and courtesans of our era, so Brighton’s
rise led to a quietening down of life in Tunbridge Wells. But from time to time it lifts its petticoats still. When the UK publication of Nabokov’s Lolita was held up for fear that publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson would be convicted of obscenity, it continued to be freely available to the public at one place in Britain: the public library in Tunbridge Wells, which had simply ordered a copy three years earlier from Paris. It proved no rival to Edgar Wallace. Said the assistant librarian to a journalist at the time, ‘Demand has never been particularly high…Our top favourites at present are Doctor Zhivago, Monty’s memoirs and the life of King George VI.’ These days, the town likes to remind you of its racy past as counterpoint to its supposed modern respectability. The town has even hosted, with a hint of the flirtatious, a Scandals at the Spa festival.
The biggest scandal I can see this sunny afternoon is that some barbarian of the 1960s dropped a pre-stressed concrete car park right in the middle of the town. In my trips across Middle England I was to recoil from several of these eyesores. Now I’m no Prince Charles, no knee-jerking enemy of modernism. The Nye Bevan International Pool in Skelmersdale new town is a squat, forbidding cube that sits perfectly well in the walkways and concrete ramparts of Skem, where a honey-stoned Georgian villa would look daft. But the car parks of towns like Bath and Tunbridge Wells smack of wilful architectural savagery, akin to Chairman Mao and the Red Guard sending all those ballerinas to work in paddy fields. I am cheered, though, by the sight of a great display in the window of a department store, where a selection of retro-portables is showing The Herbs, Button Moon, Wombles, Sooty, Roobarb and Custard and more.
I am headed for what I am told is Tunbridge Wells’ best feature, a quarter called the Pantiles. ‘Quarter’ may be putting it grandly. The Pantiles is really a sort of street, a colonnaded walkway if you want to be accurate. But whatever we call it, it is quite delightful: Italianate, maybe Moorish, indubitably Georgian. Frankly I’m saying the first things that come into my head. But I’m not alone in feeling this way. A guide to the town from the late 1800s says that a visitor to the Pantiles might remark, ‘How antique! How un-English! How foreign!’
Pantiles. I’d puzzled a little over the name earlier that day. Perhaps it was Pan-tee-lesh and referred to a covered market in medieval Constantinople. But no. Pantiles are tiles. Just a lot rarer than you get in Homebase or Topps Tiles, and unusual enough as a walkway surface to be enshrined in the area’s name. The Pantiles has been a playground and fashion parade ever since the fashionable and funky of the day first came here for the spa waters. The Musick Gallery, a wrought-iron balcony known locally as the Dutch Oven, provided musical entertainments by strolling players, a sort of superclub, I guess. The ‘season’ ran from May to October and, in Tunbridge’s Georgian heyday, the ‘Walks’ as they were then known were the place to see and be seen. There was a strict if informal protocol about parading along them: gentry on the colonnaded Upper Walks and hoi polloi on the Lower Walks. Richard Beau Nash, the dandy of the spa towns, who acted as kind of promoter cum MC here and in Bath, policed these protocols rigorously, as befitted his rather stodgy self-appointed role of ‘Arbiter Elegantorium’.
Today, even polloi such as myself can walk along the colonnaded Upper Walk without fear of ejection by Dandy, though they still have sedan-chair races here on bank holidays. This siting seems entirely appropriate, more so than holding them in Moss Side anyway. There is a charming array of shops, bars and restaurants, and on the balcony above a somewhat rumpled-looking man, a sort of Dandy gone to seed, is stretched out in a chair and snoozing in the sun. There is a Secret Games Shop where I could have killed several hours looking for new experimental Cluedos and a replacement Howzat?! Trevor Mottram’s kitchen shop is an Aladdin’s cave crammed with gadgets and whatnots and, as is obligatory in good old-fashioned hardware stores, cannot be properly negotiated without banging one’s head on colanders, trivets and spring balances. It also smells like a proper hardware shop should, though I’m never sure what that smell is. Flux, maybe, the mysterious stuff in a grey bottle that Mr Duckett would squirt sparingly on your prototype garden fork during metalwork. Brilliant though I was at metalwork, my choice of studies was to deny these islands another Isambard Kingdom Brunel, because my fancy turned to other things, like the verse plays of Christopher Fry. His big 1930s hit The Lady’s Not for Burning is unfashionable now but was a real teenage favourite of mine and not just because I got to sit next to the hauntingly beautiful Anne O’Neil. So I’ve always hated that the play is now best known for being paraphrased into a self-aggrandising quip by one Margaret Thatcher and her speechwriter drones. Anyway, Fry was director of the Tunbridge Wells players and The Lady’s Not for Burning was first performed here on the Pantiles in the Pump Room. I think of Chris Fry’s opening night and the laughter and Anne O’Neil, and I walk on in pleasant reverie.
The Pantiles has lots of nice places to eat with nice-looking people lounging about at pavement tables sipping long tall glasses of nice-looking stuff and picking elegantly at dazzling salads glistening with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. If this is all a sales pitch, it works. I ask the Spanish proprietor of the most popular eatery if he has a table for later that evening. He thinks for a bit and pops inside and pops back out and exhales slightly whilst pulling the kind of face that tells you that, yes, you’re going to get a table but he doesn’t want to make it look too easy. ‘Seven o’clock OK?’ Perfect, I reply, and make a mental note to choose whatever the girl in the yellow dress is having, as she seems to be having the best time anyone has ever had since the invention of fun. Life is certainly good in RTW, as I have decided someone must call it.
Across the road is a fossil shop, whose continued existence is testament to the quirky tastes of the British shopper and the unquenchable optimism of the British shopkeeper. I pootle about, buy a few guides and try to look interested in fossils. Most on display are very small and I fancy that the ones I’d like – a complete preserved sabre-toothed tiger perhaps, or a Pterodactyl in amber – must be both pricey and hard to come by. I fall into genial conversation with the two gentlemen within, proprietor and friend, both in smart slacks and short-sleeved shirts, each with creases you could shave with. They are clearly proud of their town and eager to share its joys with me, if a little wistful. ‘It has lost some of its glitz. I wouldn’t call it a proper spa town any more. But do try the waters, though, while you’re here.’
This very opportunity presents itself at the far end of the Pantiles, nearest the town itself. Here is the spot where Dudley spotted the trickle of discoloured water, found it good and later wrote: ‘These waters youth in age renew/Strength to the weak and sickly add/Give the pale cheek a rosy hue/And cheerful spirits to the sad.’
Today it looks disconcertingly like a rusty hole in the ground or a latrine in a particularly downmarket Albanian provincial restaurant, but I am still determined. The Bath House was built on this spot by one J.T. Groves in 1804 and did originally contain showers and baths but fell into disrepair in the middle of the nineteenth century and became a shop, possibly selling fossils. In 1987, the façade was restored and you can once again enjoy a cup of the fabled stuff, as dispensed by the ‘dipper’.
Today’s dipper is a young woman with smart, severe designer glasses somewhat at odds with her period garb of little floppy bonnet and petticoats. Spotting me, a lucrative potential customer – it’s ten pence a shot after all – she puts down her fat sci-fi paperback and emerges from the Dipper’s House. ‘Can I tempt you, sir?’ she smiles, getting into character a little shyly and, of course, she can. I hand over my ten pence in exchange for a little glass of the surprisingly clear water. On the town’s web forum, one posting reads, ‘Did you ever try drinking ink when you were a kid, just to see what it tasted like? Well, the chalybeate springs in the Pantiles taste exactly the same.’ I can tell you that it is much nicer than that. Yes, it is metallic-tasting and a tad minerally – I have no idea if there is such a word, by the way, and the spell-check certainly
doesn’t like it – but it’s not the green sulphurous stew I was fearing.
Energised, I decide to head up the Commons, the town’s beauty spot. As I turn the corner I walk straight into a girl gamely trying to run in ludicrous heels with a plastic cape around her shoulders and dripping wet hair tressed up in bows of silver paper. Showering me with water, she starts to explain that she sat down to have her hair done without realising that she had no money and the hairdresser’s credit card machine is on the blink but, really, you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work this one out. I leave her clasping her soggy money, cross the busy road and head up the track to the Commons.
Long before scandalous spa swingers, disgusted letter writers and lunching ladies came to Tunbridge Wells, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers made camp on the sandstone outcrops of what are known as Tunbridge and Rusthall Commons. Down the years they played host to Saxon swineherds, then freeholders, becoming a renowned beauty spot during the Victorian era when substantial improvements were made, such as a lake and terraced walk, whilst maintaining the untamed feel which in Pelton’s guidebook of 1871 was spoken of glowingly: ‘To our modern taste its natural and wild condition renders it far more attractive than the artificial parks which it is the fashion to provide for the healthful recreation of the dwellers in large cities. The furze bushes and the brake are the most noticeable ornaments; but the whole expanse abounds with other plants and blossoms — ling and heath, chamomile and thyme, milkwort and wild violets, being among the most abundant. In April and May the golden bloom of the furze, which is unusually profuse in this spot, delights the eye, and its rich perfume scents the breeze.’ As was the wont of sentimental Victorians they thought that the famous Toad rock, in fact produced by wind erosion during the Ice Age, was ‘the remains of an ancient sphinx’. Pretty much every rock on the common was named according to a fancied resemblance to something or other: the Elephant, the Pulpit, the Fox’s Hole, the Footsteps, the Cottage Loaf, the Parson’s Face, the Cradle, the Bloodstain, the Lion, the Pig’s Head. Nowadays, we would doubtless have Pete Doherty Rock, the Mobile Phone Stone and the Giant Bacardi Breezer.
Adventures on the High Teas Page 7