• Through our quarterly newsletter, we report about developments affecting the town and our involvement in them, together with articles of historical interest.
  
  
• We publish a range of inexpensive illustrated guides, leaflets and walks on the town's heritage.
• Since 2003 we have published nine Local History Monographs. Please scroll down for details.

TUNBRIDGE WELLS IN 1909

The Year we became 'Royal'

by Chris Jones

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 9
ISBN No: 978–0-9560944-0-7
Retail Price: £8.95

In 1909, King Edward VII gave permission for Tunbridge Wells to call itself ‘Royal’ Tunbridge Wells. It was a public relations coup for the town’s Advertising Association which was working to bring in more visitors. Chris Jones describes the procedures behind the granting of the prefix, and explains what else was happening in Tunbridge Wells that year: Boy Scouts and suffragettes, ‘right to work’ marchers, débutantes presented at Court, a clergyman who denounced the ‘debased tastes’ of his congregation, and workhouse inmates who complained because they were served Grape Nuts instead of gruel for breakfast. All this against a highly-charged political background with Lloyd George trying to raise money to pay for Old Age Pensions and Dreadnoughts, while the House of Lords led the country into a constitutional crisis.

Chris Jones is Secretary of the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society. He studied History at the University of Warwick, and has worked in the IT industry for over thirty years.

TUNBRIDGE WELLS IN LITERATURE

An anthology

Compiled by Susan Brown

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 8
ISBN No: 978–0-9545343-9-4
Retail Price: £6.95

As a Spa Town and a very popular recreational destination for four hundred years, Tunbridge Wells has figured in many novels, poems, diaries, letters and travelogues. From John Evelyn in 1652 to Richard Cobb in the 1980s, people who either lived in the town, or more commonly, visited it for the season, wrote their impressions and experiences. Well-known authors, such as William Makepeace Thackeray and H.G. Wells, set parts of their novels in the town, seeking to recreate the feel of the place at its hey-day in the Georgian period, or during its more temperate Victorian popularity.

In this Anthology, Susan Brown has compiled the descriptions and the views of some thirty-four of these residents and visitors.

Susan Brown has lived in Tunbridge Wells since the mid-1950s and until her recent retirement, was the Tunbridge Wells Local History Librarian. She studied Library Science at what was then the Brighton College of Technology (now Brighton University) and qualified as a Chartered Librarian in 1971.

AN HISTORICAL ATLAS OF TUNBRIDGE WELLS

Edited by John Cunningham

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 7
ISBN No: 978–0-9545343-8-7
Retail Price: £16.95

An Atlas of some 79 maps of Tunbridge Wells and its immediate area, from 16th. to 20th. centuries. A3 format. 136 pp, 116 Plates (28 of them in colour). Laminated colour cover. Perfect-bound. Published December 2007.

THE ORIGINS OF WARWICK PARK

By John Cunningham

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 6
ISBN No: 978-0-9545343-7-0
Retail Price: £7.95

The story of how and why the Home Farm Estate of the Marquess of Abergavenny became the Warwick Park Estate and Nevill Ground of Tunbridge Wells. Their origins are unusually well-documented in the Archives of the Marquess and the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council.

Warwick Park was originally intended to be an Estate, following the style created in Tunbridge Wells by Calverley Park, Nevill Park, Camden Park and Hungershall Park, and if carried through, as proposed, would almost certainly have been the largest development to that date in the town.

The Archives also reveal a background of interesting and very different people:

– the 1st. Marquess of Abergavenny, a now largely-forgotten but at the time an extremely important eminence grise of the Conservative Party, who was capital-rich but income-restricted by the agricultural recession of the 1890s;

– the Marquess’s Agent who was a friend of the Town Clerk and who was to die unexpectedly in the middle of the development;

– the competing builders and developers, architects and surveyors, all of whom had different ideas about what they wanted – all of which led to alternative plans, conflicting circumstances and differing motivations, which are revealed for the first time in this book, and which should make it a subject of interest not just to the residents of Tunbridge Wells, but to the social and political historian as well.

John Cunningham read History at Peterhouse, Cambridge in the late 1950’s and has written several local histories. Now retired, his career was essentially in Marketing and General Management in the advertising, marketing and publishing industries. In retirement, he was a founder of the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society; and is currently the Chairman of both the Civic Society and its Local History Group.

400 YEARS OF THE WELLS

By members of the Local History Group of The Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society

Edited by John Cunningham

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 5
ISBN No: 0-9545343-5-2
Retail Price: £7.95
196 pages

It is a salutary thought that but for the relatively chance discovery of chalybeate springs by Dudley, 3rd Lord North, four hundred years ago in 1606, the attractive an sylvian town of Royal Tunbridge Wells might never have existed.

To mark the 400th Anniversary of the discovery of the Wells, the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society has written this new history of Tunbridge Wells, the fifth in its series of Local History monographs, which brings the history of the Town up to 2005.

It has been written by eight members of the Group - Lionel Anderson, John Arkell, Ann Bates, Geoffrey Copus, John Cunningham, Chris Jones and Dr. Philip Whitbourn, about whom more details will be found at the back of the publication.

THE RESIDENTIAL PARKS OF TUNBRIDGE WELLS

By members of the Local History Group of The Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society

Edited by John Cunningham

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 4
ISBN No: 0-9545343-3-6 (1 December 2004)
Retail Price: £5.95
94 pages

In the year 1828 the talented achitect Decimus Burton brought London's Regent Park concept of villas in a landscaped setting to John Ward's Calverley Estate in Tunbridge Wells.

Other landowners soon followed suit and, by the end of the 19th century, Tunbridge Wells was ringed with residential "parks".

Some of these contained spacious villas set in parkland, while others had smaller open spaces, or were sylvan streets.

Despite modern pressures, Tunbridge Wells continues to owe much of its pleasing character to these 19th century residential parks.

This is the fourth of the new local History monographs published by the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society. It has been written by six members of the Group - Ann Bates, Susan Brown, Geoffrey and Brenda Copus, John Cunningham and Dr. Philip Whitbourn, about whom more details will be found at the back of the publication.

THE SKINNERS' SCHOOL

Its controversial birth and its landmark buildings

By Cecil Beeby and Philip Whitbourn

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 3
ISBN No: 0-9545343-2-8 (1 October 2004)
Retail Price: £4.95
92 pages

The Late Cecil Beeby, MA, a former Scholar of Jesus College, Cambridge, and sometime member of The Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society, was the Headmaster of The Skinners' School from 1953 until 1975.

Dr. Philip Whitbourn, OBE, FSA, FRIBA, is President of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society, of which he was a founder member in 1959. He is also Chairman of the Local History Group of the Society.

Since 1887 the High-Victorian buildings of The Skinner's School have been a landmark on the main approach to Tunbridge Wells from the north. Their birth involved a tale of rivalry between two local townships. On the one hand was the ancient town of Tonbridge; on the other, the newer but larger historic town of Tunbridge Wells.

In the end, honour was satisfied all round and the long-established Tonbridge School, The Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells and the Judd School in Tonbridge all peaceably co-exist beneath the kindly wing of the City of London's Worshipful Company of Skinners.

This is the third in a series of Monographs published by the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society.

RESEARCHING ROYAL TUNBRIDGE WELLS

A bibliography of historical sources

Compiled by Susan Brown

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 2
ISBN No: 0-9545343 1 X (1 October 2003)
Retail Price: £4.95
64 pages

Susan Brown has lived in Tunbridge Wells since the mid-1950s.
She studied Library Science at the Brighton College of Technology and qualified as a Chartered Librarian in 1971. Since then she has worked in the local library service in a number of capacities.
She is currently the Team Librarian responsible for Local Studies at Tunbridge Wells Library and is therefore well placed to produce a bibliography of sources of the history of the town and its inhabitants.

This is the second in a series of Monographs published by the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society.

DECIMUS BURTON, Esquire

Architect and Gentleman (1800-1881)

By Philip Whitbourn

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Local History Monograph No. 1
ISBN No: 0-9545343-0-1 (1 July 2003)
Retail Price: £4.95
68 pages, 70 illustrations

Dr. Philip Whitbourn, OBE, FSA, FRIBA, is President of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society, of which he was a founder member in 1959. He is also Chairman of the Local History Group of the Society.
Educated at Sevenoaks School and University College, London, he held the post of Secretary to the International Council on Monuments and Sites (UK) from 1995 until 2002 and, before that, the post of Chief Architect at English Heritage. He was awarded the OBE in 1993.

This is the first of a series of Monographs covering differing aspects of the history of Royal Tunbridge Wells. It has been produced by the Local History Group of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society.

Decimus Burton is of seminal importance to the history of Tunbridge Wells since, in the 1820s and 1830s, he established an architectural and landscape character that remains a prominent feature of the town to this day.

FURTHER TITLES IN PREPARATION, INCLUDE:

Cricket in Tunbridge Wells. A history of the game and the Nevill Ground. Due 2009

Tunbridge Wells in the Second World War. A history. Due 2009

All these publications are available through the ISBN number from any bookshop, but specifically available in Tunbridge Wells at:
Halls Bookshop, Ottakars Bookstore, Sussex Bookshop, WHSmith, Royal Victoria Place, Tourist Office, the Old Fishmarket in the Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells Reference Library and Tunbridge Wells Museum.