Vale Road Methodist Church

Reprint of an article that appeared in the Summer 2011 Edition of Common Ground.

By Philip Whitbourn.

Much consternation was caused recently, by an application to demolish Vale Royal Methodist Church in London Road, and to build a five-storied angular modern block in its place, incorporating fourteen flats above a new place of worship.

The church was built in 1878 by the well-known local firm of Willicombe and Oakley, to the design of the London architect Charles Bell. The building is in an early Gothic style and is faced with Kentish rag-stone, with Bath stone dressings and shafts of granite.

When the scheme was turned down, a person from the church was reported to have commented that it was not as though they were wanting to knock down Westminster Abbey. That, however, is not at all the point. If Westminster Abbey was to be taken as the benchmark for meriting conservation, then few historic buildings would survive in Kent. Canterbury Cathedral perhaps, but not much else.

The Kentish town of Dover boasts a noble castle, and Maidstone an Archbishops Palace. Nevertheless, in terms of historic townscape, they are both now examples of places where the whole adds up to less than the sum of the parts. In Royal Tunbridge Wells the reverse is true. Here we are fortunate in having a number of Georgian, and more especially Victorian, buildings which, although sometimes relatively modest in themselves, add up to a historic town of great character, where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. Nowhere is this more true than in the sequence of older buildings facing our commons.

Vale Royal Methodist Church is included in the Local List of Heritage Assets within the Royal Tunbridge Wells and Rusthall Conservation Areas. In our town of Tunbridge Wells, two former Congregational Churches provide commendable examples of adaptation for new uses. One in Mount Pleasant for commercial use, and the other in Albion Road for residential use.
It would be good if that kind of approach could be explored at Vale Royal, where the old schoolroom beneath, might offer scope for the provision of a smaller continuing place of worship, if desired.

Noteworthy Buildings on The Commons – The Royal Wells Hotel

There has been a hostelry in the vicinity of the present Royal Wells Hotel for the past three centuries or so. John Bowra’s map of 1738 names the “Huntsman and Hounds” on this part of Mount Ephraim, although Bowra’s map of 1808 has the “Hare and Hounds” facing the common in this position.

The building illustrated here, which was the venue for our 2009 Annual Dinner, dates from around 1830. Thus it was still new when the young Victoria stayed at Boyne House next door in 1835, with her mother the Duchess of Kent, whose impressive coat of arms surmounts the hotel’s parapet. Originally called the Mount Ephraim Hotel, the establishment has also been known as the Royal Hotel, the Royal Mount Ephraim Hotel, the Royal Wells Inn, and now the Royal Wells Hotel.

A glimpse of the hotel, as it was in Victoria’s time, can be seen in a picture of the common and Mount Ephraim in Colbran’s guide of the early 1840s. In this, the Tunbridge Wells artist Charles Tattershall Dodd shows the building, resplendent with its Royal coat of arms, and the word HOTEL above the right-hand second floor window. At that time, the first floor had a pretty veranda along the front, with a canopy and balcony that were typical of the Regency period. However, in the late 19th century the veranda was replaced with an ambitious winter garden extending across the full width of the building.

By 1950, under the then proprietor Cecil Wyer, the Hotel was advertising itself as providing hot and cold water, gas fires and telephones in all of its bedrooms, together with excellent cuisine and service. With a telegram address of “Comfort”, its claim was “Your happiness and comfort is our first consideration”.

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Noteworthy Buildings on The Commons – The Wellington Hotel

The Spring issue of Common Ground featured the Spa Hotel, and previous issues have included articles about the Royal Wells and the former Earls Court Hotels on the Mount Ephraim ridge. This time it is the turn of the Travelodge, or the Wellington Hotel as this prominent building was known for most of its life.

Built in around 1873, partly on the site of a pair of houses called Gilead Place, and partly in the grounds of Chancellor House, the property originally formed a mansion block of eight terraced houses. A surviving plan of that date, for new stabling to be built at Gilead Place to the designs of the local architect William Bamsley Hughes, shows the building as “new houses”. Hughes’ client was Francis Peek (1834-99), one of the richest tea merchants of his day, and first cousin of Sir Henry Peek, Chairman of Peek Freans biscuits.

The Wellington was opened on Monday 21 st November 1875, under the management of John Braby, Hughes having converted five of the eight houses to form a hotel.
Formerly the proprietor of the old Kentish Hotel near the Pantiles, Braby was described in the Courier as having “all the essential qualifications, urbanity, courtesy, intelligent comprehension, and mature discrimination, that the head of a hotel imperatively demands.”

The venture seems to have proved a great success for, in 1898, the remaining houses of the mansion block were added, as part of a major re-modelling. This was undertaken jointly by Hughes and the nationally known architect Sir Robert Edis, who was also working at that time on the spectacular Great Central Hotel (now the Landmark) at London’s Marylebone Station. The central porch and the grand staircase were features of this 1898 re-modelling of The Wellington.

Coloured glass in the grand staircase window incorporates the Wellington armorial bearings; the Wellesley Cross and Plates quartered with the Cowley Lion Rampant.
An advertisement in Pelton’s Directory tells us that the establishment was indeed patronised by the Duke of Wellington, but not of course the first Duke, who had died in 1852. There is no evidence that the “Iron Duke” ever visited Tunbridge Wells, although his Duchess came several times and stayed nearby on Mount Ephraim.

The hotel underwent further refurbishments, notably in 1909 and following the acquisition of the property by Trust Houses in 1927. Nevertheless, the Italianate grandeur of the frontage to the Common, with its canopied first floor balconies in the Regency tradition, has remained little changed over the years. Today, this listed building forms part of the budget hotel chain Travelodge, which has upwards of 360 hotels across the UK, Ireland and Spain.

Philip Whitbourn

Noteworthy Buildings on The Commons – The Spa Hotel

The Spa Hotel, one of our corporate sponsors, abuts the Bishop’s Down part of the Common, famed as the spot where Queen Henrietta Maria and her entourage pitched their tents, while taking the waters in 1629.

The present building started life as a country mansion called Bishop’s Down Grove, which was built in the 1760s by the physician Sir George Kelley, sometime Sheriff of Kent and Lord of the Manor of Rusthall. The building had then, as it has now, a central entrance, with five first-floor windows above, between projecting canted bays on either side. This still forms the central core of the Hotel. Sir George was a great supporter of the horse racing on the Common for which, we are told, he frequently gave a silver cup.

On the death of Sir George Kelley in 1772, the property was purchased by Major Yorke, who had distinguished himself under
the command of Lord Clive at the Battle of Plessey in 1757. Major Yorke occupied Bishop’s Down Grove for some twenty five years, and his memory is honoured by the name Major York’s Road, which crosses the Common, to link Bishop’s Down with The Pantiles.

In 1834 Queen Victoria, then a young Princess, was a visitor to Bishop’s Down Grove, where she watched a Yeomanry Tournament and, it is said, sat sketching under the trees. Then, in 1878, further distinguished visitors arrived with great aplomb for the opening of Bishop’s Down Grove as a Hydropathic Sanatorium. This phase in the building’s history proved short-lived, and the property was re-designated as the Spa Hotel in 1880.

The change of function from a country mansion involved much enlargement, both sideways and upwards. In the 1870s the noteworthy Tunbridge Wells firm of Willicombe and Oakley seems to have been involved in the enlargement process, and local architect M Lawrence Caley in the design of the West Wing. Murkin Lawrence Caley was the father of Herbert Murkin Caley, the Mayor at the time of the granting of the prefix “Royal” to the town in 1909. The East Wing, which contains the Chandelier Restaurant, is understood to be the work of the London architect Benjamin Tabberer in 1881, as was the raising in height of the old mansion.

By the 1890s, the Hotel was capable of accommodating 150 visitors, and was offering a range of bathing facilities, including Turkish, Electric, and swimming. The Goring family bought the Hotel in 1964 and, in 2006, sold the property to Scragg Hotels Limited.

Philip Whitbourn

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