Home, Sweet Home (from my ex-website)

No Place Like Home

Home, to me, is Tonbridge in Kent, in the south-eastern corner of England - about thirty miles south of London and more or less between the capital and Hastings on the south coast.

Known as the "garden of England", the county of Kent is best known for its crops of hops for brewing (and therefore its beers and ales) and orchard fruits, as well as seafood and the kind of pastoral villages that often appear in movies and on TV as "typical English" villages.

Tonbridge is a town of around 50,000 situated on the river Medway. Its name - tunbridge - means "the town of bridges"; however, another reliable source reckons it's from "dun" meaning hill and "brid" meaning castle and derives from the nearby Iron Age fort remains at Castle Hill. Take your pick! The spelling of the name is also historically variable - the use of an "o" instead of a "u" was eventually decided for us by the Royal Mail, so as to avoid confusion with the nearby Tunbridge Wells.

The river flows from its source in the west on the edge of Ashdown Forest to its estuary at the city of Rochester on the east coast. Tonbridge castle, built by William the Conqueror to discourage that well-known French villain Norman Conquest from sneaking upstream and worrying the townsfolk, still overlooks the river and is a feature of the town's crest.

Its chief claims to fame seem to be its former cricket ball-making industry, having a kind of dartboard named after it and claiming as one of its own double-Olympic gold medal-winning athlete from the Athens games Kelly Holmes, although strictly-speaking she's from Hildenborough which adjoins the north end of the town.

The town's upstart offspring Royal Tunbridge Wells, built around a natural mineral-water spring up in the hills about 5 miles to the south-west, has eclipsed it somewhat in the national fame stakes, what with the royal patronage and all that (although this could easily mean that Queen Victoria went through the town on the train by accident once), to the point that Tunbridge became Tonbridge so as not to disappoint those searching for the wells when they "only" found a Norman stronghold and loads of pubs. It also probably gave a welcome boost to the guy who painted all the road signs.


For more details, you could do a lot worse than visiting the official Tonbridge council website, or even Tonbridge On The Internet (TOTI), both of which probably contradict everything I've just told you.