Solar panels, storage & EV charging in Tunbridge Wells

Census day 2021 found 51,232 people living in the Royal Tunbridge Wells built-up area, compared with 49,892 a decade earlier.

Purpose-built flats house almost as many Royal Tunbridge Wells households as semi-detached homes — 24.9% against 25.8% of the built-up area's 22,221 households — and a further 10.6% live in converted or shared houses, with 18.2% in detached and 17.3% in terraced homes (Census 2021, summed from the town's output areas).

The Royal Tunbridge Wells Conservation Area was first designated on 7 November 1969, and Molyneux Park, Broadwater Down and Pembury Road, once designated separately, have since been amalgamated into it. In the borough's conservation areas, the council says planning permission is needed to fit a solar panel on any wall of a house that faces a highway.

Three-quarters of the Royal Tunbridge Wells built-up area's 22,237 households (75.6%) depended on mains gas alone for heating at the 2021 Census; electric-only heating covered 12.8%, oil just 0.8%, and only 40 households (0.2%) used renewable heating on its own (summed from the town's output areas).

Existing homes across the Tunbridge Wells parliamentary constituency have a median EPC score of just 64, against 84 for new-builds; overall the median is 66 (Band D) and only about 42% of dwellings with a certificate reach Band C or above (estimates from ONS data on EPCs lodged in the ten years to March 2023).

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council declared a climate and biodiversity emergency in July 2019 and has set a target to become a net zero council by 2047; it has also fitted 90 solar panels to the Amelia building, which it says will cut the building's carbon footprint by 12 tons a year.

Tunbridge Wells grew up around a chalybeate spring discovered in 1606 by Dudley North, 3rd Baron North, and was a fashionable resort in the mid-1700s under Beau Nash, when the Pantiles and its spring drew visitors to take the waters. King Edward VII granted the town its 'Royal' prefix in 1909.

Tunbridge Wells lies on the Kent–East Sussex border — a county boundary flagstone still sits outside the church of King Charles the Martyr — at the northern edge of the High Weald, whose sandstone breaks the surface at Wellington Rocks on the Common and at High Rocks.