The Pantiles is the heart of historic Tunbridge Wells and the reason the town exists. The colonnaded promenade was laid out in the seventeenth century alongside the chalybeate spring that drew aristocratic visitors down from London to take the waters. The raised walkway under its long line of porticos was where they paraded between treatments — and where they were watched, judged, gossiped about and occasionally proposed to.
The architecture is a graceful mix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shopfronts, with a bandstand at the lower end and the spring itself sheltered under a small portico at the upper. Today it is lined with independent shops, restaurants, antique dealers and cafes, with a farmers' market on the first and third Saturday of every month. Free jazz concerts at the bandstand in summer keep the original spirit of public entertainment alive.