Anke: Royal Tunbridge Wells

The Pantiles has been experiencing a transformation recently and the famous chef Rosemary Shrager is one of the people behind these changes. Rosemary and her team are breathing life into the Corn Exchange with their newly-opened cookery school.

Mrs Anke slaps her dough about.

Mrs Anke and I were invited down for the day for a taster course of baking bread, filleting fish, and - the part I was particularly looking forward to - eating.

The luxurious kitchen is quite an amazing space - a welcoming blend of modern yet homely workstations put you at ease and allow you to settle in right away. The feeling of reassurance was also helped by a beautifully laid out table of coffee and cakes that greeted us as we sat down with Rosemary to break the ice and get to know each other. The lovely Jonathan was also on hand to see to everyone wishes: every kitchen needs a Jonathan I'm told, and we agree.

Right, on to the business of cookery.

Now, I must admit that I did hide behind my camera for most of the day, only venturing out to have a go at extracting a fillet from a sea bass. Which I think I did rather well at. I was more than happy to watch Mrs Anke and the rest of the invited guests exercise their skills under the expert guidance of Rosemary's executive chef, John Kirby, and his colleague Johnny. There are lots of people with names starting with J here aren't there.

Being a boy I was keeping a keen eye on the technology surrounding us. Their extraordinarily well-appointed kitchen is not only one of the most advanced in the country it is also one of the most eco-friendly. As a few examples: they have conductive hot plates which have special matching pans that help reduce energy usage by 30%, no wasteful gas here. Only 10% of their food waste is actually thrown away - the rest is dried in a dehumidifier and made into powders and ingredients for stocks and sauces, and they have an amazing glasswasher that does a cycle in 75 seconds!

After enjoying our little taster of the classes on offer (you can read more detail on Mrs Anke's post) we all sat down together around the chef's workspace to watch the masters at work, have a chat about food, and sample three courses made with the ingredients that we had helped to prepare. The dishes were delicious and to be able to watch them being prepared and cooked right under your nose is a really special experience. Quite how the chefs deal with all those pots and pans whilst chatting and answering our questions is beyond me.

I think this venture is a real coup for Tunbridge Wells and looks set to become quite a treasured glocal™ business. Glocal? Eh? What am I on about? Well, people are already booking up courses from all over the world which will be fabulous for our local economy, and one of the core values of the school is to use as much local produce as possible. Pretty much everything used in the school is sourced from around us here in Kent and Sussex. See, global and local - glocal™. Whatever I'm gibbering on about one thing I am absolutely sure of is that this new school will give the bottom end of town a real boost.

They will also be opening a delicatessen and café at the end of the year. So come on Tunbridge Wells let's get behind them, it will bring great things to our town.

Mrs Anke and I really enjoyed the day, we learnt a lot in such a small space of time, and can heartily recommend that if you want the perfect unusual present this year then head on over to their website to book.

You can now head on over to Mrs Anke's blog and she will fill you in on the the details of the day.

We have very kindly been given access to the rooftop of the Wellington Gate building next to the Ritz Cinema to be able to exclusively document the "works" over the coming months (probably years). Whilst I was up there I grabbed a lot of photographs and made a few into some large panoramas. Have a click and zoom right in.

Trinity Church, Mount Ephraim, and The Common.

Click for panorama of 17,780 x 3,183 pixels, 18MB.

Ritz Cinema, Mount Pleasant, High Street, and Pantiles.

Click for panorama of 13,241 x 3,594 pixels, 17MB.

Stay tuned to the Cinema Project for photos and the Tunbridge Wells Project blog because we are hoping to get a live feed camera linked up very soon.

A huge thank you to the very kind staff at Wellington Gate for their generosity and willingness to help.

I received a tip many moons ago from regular readers Matthew Morrison and Mike Goode about a rather special shop on Camden Road (it's actually half in Quarry Road) which apparently had one of the most accurate clocks in the world inside. It turned out to contain a lot more than that.

Time to Remember is owned by Andrew, who you can see in the photo above, and his shop is a horologists dream.

Within a few seconds of saying hello we excitedly got onto the subject of clocks, obviously, and I had to ask straight off the bat "where's the most accurate clock in the world?"

Now, if you had to choose from the hundreds that surrounded you in this shop I guarantee that this one would have been very far from the top of your list because there, sitting high above a door frame, was a simple tiny little clock about four inches across.

"Is it really the most accurate clock in the world?" I hear you ask. Well, nearly, it's definitely the most accurate in Tunbridge Wells that's for sure, and it owes this accuracy to the NPL-CsF2 atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory from which it receives a time signal every day. Astonishingly it is accurate to within 1 second every 138 million years. So yes whilst it is one of the most accurate clocks in the world, it just so happens there are many more like it. There is a rather nice video of it where you can hear it's thunderous ticking.

Now, what there isn't many more of is the much more interesting clock below. This one is rather special indeed.

The clock you see above is called the Shortt-Synchronome Clock No.3 and it is a part of one of the most important developments in timekeeping since the invention of the pendulum clock two hundred years before it. This clock is directly responsible for detecting that planet Earth had a slight wobble. That's right, this clock sitting on a wall in a shop in Camden Road helped discover that our planet wobbled on its axis. How amazing is that?

This clock began its life in Greenwich, the home of time, in 1921. It was the third clock made by English engineer WH Shortt who perfected the free-pendulum idea. In an ordinary pendulum clock the free swinging of the pendulum, on which timekeeping accuracy depends, is interfered with by the need to sustain the pendulums motion and to count the swings to tell the time. In Shortt's free-pendulum clock, these two functions are carried out by a subsidiary ‘slave clock’, therefore allowing the master pendulum to swing freely except for a fraction of a second each half-minute, when it receives an impulse from the slave. This enables the clock to have amazing accuracy.

This clock, when installed in Greenwich, was used to help keep GMT, and during its first year it was accurate to within 0.01 seconds. Three years later in 1924 the clock was moved to other duties as more accurate clocks were being produced by Shortt. It became the standard time bearer for what is known as Sidereal Time, that is the time the earth takes to revolve once on its axis, which is not exactly 24hrs but 24hrs and 4 minutes. This is used by astronomers to keep their telescope trained on a specific spot in the sky.

How about that? Amazing eh? There it is now keeping perfect time sitting unassumingly on a wall in Camden Road, and do you want to know something even more amazing about this amazing (too many amazings?) timepiece? It was found in a junk shop! One of Andrew's friends who happened to work at the Greenwich Museum discovered it one day whilst browsing and passed it onto Andrew.

I really recommend you pop by and say hello to Andrew and take a look at these clocks because they are masterpieces.

There are just far too many wonderful clocks in this aladdin's cave to go into detail about them all here but here are a few of the more interesting examples in Andrew's ever-changing display.

This clock above is made by local Tunbridge Wells maker called William Ruffell. He operated around 1874 from, and here's the spooky bit, a shop in Camden Road! It's a rather wonderful balloon clock and would look superb on any mantle. Alas I couldn't find enough money in Mrs Anke's purse to buy it right there and then. Andrew says that clocks from local makers fly out the door in no time (first clock joke), so if you buy this clock I want words with you.

This small odd-shaped clock is given to recipients of the Order of the Garter. It therefore could've been owned by royalty yet here it sits in a shop on Camden Road. Amazing!

This is a GPO clock and would've graced the walls of a telephone exchange. The red diamonds marking the 15 minute intervals generate the call timing pulses necessary to charge telephone subscribers for their calls. Callers in those days would've paid for 15 minutes at a time rather than today's per second charging.

This clock is on the outside of the shop and it's another of the "most accurate in the world" clocks so this is the one to set your watch to when you pass by. The interesting thing about this one is that it was made by Andrew himself and it's a direct replica of the clock onboard the Astoria studio that belongs to Pink Floyd. Cool eh?

Now, if you do visit Andrew's shop the first thing that strikes you (second clock joke) is the sound. It envelopes you. Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick...well you get the message. It's rather lovely and actually quite restful after a while. We made a few audio recordings whilst we were in the shop, and Andrew was kind enough to set lots of the clocks of chiming. Take a listen below.

If you'd like to learn more about Andrew and his shop then head on over to Mrs Anke's blog where she has written a lovely piece. We'd both like to say a huge thank you to Andrew for taking the time to chat to us and for our lovely readers for dropping us the tip. Thank you all.

Mrs Anke and I took a lovely spring walk through to Grosvenor and Hilbert Park today and bumped into Bridget who was carving graffiti into the new artworks. I should add that she was supposed to be there, she wasn't being naughty.

Bridget at work.

Bridget is a Sculptor, Lettercutter, and Memorial Artist who is spending twelve days carving as many of your suggestions into the soft stone as she can. She has already made good progress and the lovely weather is surely helping her along.

There are some really lovely suggestions of graffiti that have been carved into the stone so far, one particular example that both Mrs Anke and I liked, below, just happened to be the daughter of Polly who turned up to inspect the work so far.

Oliver, Polly and Jo talk Mrs Anke through the carvings.

Pop along and have a look for yourself and see if your doodle made it into the stone. If you can't do that then click the link below for a few photographs instead.

Click here to see more photographs from the carving.

I just took a walk into the glorious sunshine to try and get some inspiration for a blog post when I was hit with one, not literally of course, that would've been terrible.

Some of you may know that today, Tuesday, is MiggyMag Day, one of the required elements of which is Autocar Magazine. So you can imagine the grin that appears on my face when I see an Autocar bus drive past, and that is exactly what I bumped into this afternoon, again not literally, that would've been tragic.

Anyway, onto the interesting portion of this post.

The very first bus service to run in the UK was Shillibeer's Omnibus in London in 1829 and the first to run in Tunbridge Wells was in 1842. It ran to Tonbridge to pick up the train service to London as our own station had yet to be built, that wasn't completed until 1846. The 40 mile trip to London by road before 1842 was a rather tiring affair as the roads were in very bad shape (ring any bells in 2013?), so the service to the train station to pick up the train was very popular.

The growth of the railways, and especially the completion of our own station, put pay to omnibus services to London and also to Tonbridge to a small degree. The rail was just far quicker and far more comfortable than the road so the horse-drawn buses just couldn't compete. The omnibus companies continued to run services to other nearby towns but it was the introduction of the motorised omnibus service in around 1900 that really gave the business the shot in the arm it needed. Now the buses could travel further distances with more passengers and much quicker than they used to.

One of the oldest of these companies is still sort of running today but only in name, and that is the Autocar. They first appeared in town in around 1913 and ran services to Southborough, Pembury, Rusthall, Langton, Speldhurst, Matfield, and High Brooms. It wasn't to last long though as the company was acquired by the Maidstone and District bus company in July 1933, it continued under the Autocar name until 1935 before being fully merged and disappearing from our streets. That was until 2001 when a new bus company was formed and decided to use the same name. Now they give me a smile every time I see them.