A Personal Journey into the Lost Working-Class Heart of Tunbridge Wells

Ian Richardson

Published 5th November 2026.

Many people will remember the narrow old lanes lost to the Royal Victoria Place shopping centre in Tunbridge Wells. How many people know how long the lanes were there, though, or how they acquired their distinctive names? This book aims to answer those questions and a lot more besides, but with a semi-autobiographical slant. It was the author’s burning curiosity and personal connections with the area that prompted him to turn detective, and it took him on a fascinating and at times deeply moving journey into the past.

From Basinghall Street to Ely Lane takes a magnifying glass to the lost quarter, including:

• Its semi-rural beginnings in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars
• Coming of age in the 1820s
• Descent into the town’s largest and most notorious Victorian slum
• The Salvation Army’s eighty-four years at the beating heart of the lanes
• A legendary lost pub and its people
• Three schools and more than a hundred years of education
• 12^th September 1940
• The bittersweet twilight of the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s a unique and engrossing story that can finally be told.

144 pages, 240x170mm.