In the summer of 1995, we arrived on the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells to discover that under the governance of a historical interpretation company, Past Pleasures, time had apparently moved backwards to 1745. We were enchanted almost immediately, plunged headlong into the fray, and the Georgian Festival became an annual pilgrimage for the next eight years. It was the source of some of the richest experiences of my life, and we made some wonderful, immensely talented friends, both in the 20th/21st centuries, and in the 18th. As a result we have a lot of archive material that deserved better than merely being stored in boxes, and this is my attempt to make some of it more widely available. My heartfelt thanks to those brilliant people who brought it all to life for us - as they did, for example, on a warm August evening in 1747. I was sitting out on the Pantiles among an array of 18th Century notables, with a concert due to start:
"There was a moment, here, as I turned to my left and my eyes fell upon these people whom I thought of as my friends - Dorothy Hobart, Mrs Strode, Lady Suffolk, Tom Knyfton, Lord Chesterfield, George Reed, and Samuel Foote - and I knew that here, now, in this place, with these people, was above all other places where I wanted to be; and I could hardly believe my good fortune. At the interval I tried to explain some of this to Tom Knyfton, who came over to ask how I was enjoying the concert. He thought such joy was a great blessing."
[A Pantiles Journal, 1747]
Alan Davis