60,000 at Festive Tun Wells Event

The organisers of the Christmas Kick off event in Tunbridge Wells last Saturday say that record numbers of people came to the town for all the attractions.

60,000 people turned up - double a normal Saturday.

The afternoon stalls in Mount Pleasant were particularly successful, although there were issues created by the sheer number of visitors and a last minute problem with the fireworks venue.

Some visitors struggled to the see the Santa parade and the organisers say lessons will be learnt and more details of the route and timings will be available next time.

Meanwhile the special Christmas activities get into full swing this weekend.  They include a "Rudolf Runner" Christmas road train taking people from the Pantiles to the RVP shopping centre. 

Children have the chance to spot elves getting up to mischief on shelves around the town centre and send a letter to Santa. And for adults Beau Nash himself will take you on a tour of the town centre asking you to spot both true and false stories about the town.

Alex Green, who’s the chief executive of Tunbridge Wells Business Improvement District, was in charge of co-ordinating the Christmas Kick Off day and he spoke to West Kent Radio.

This is a transcript of those audio comments of Alex Green (pictured below) about Saturday 14th November 2025:

"So in general, we are really pleased with Saturday.  We ran our first ever Festive Fair, which included turning Mount Pleasant into a new town square. We had 10 community performances, which went really well. They were really well received by the audiences. The Funfair rides were really popular and covered their costs. The stallholders made money, and the community stands - of which we had loads and it was really great to have so much engagement - had really good engagement with the public, and they were really pleased to be there.

So the Festive Fair, we were really pleased with. 

Unfortunately for the parade, we did have a couple of issues. We had a last minute complication with the fireworks, and our team worked really hard, and whilst we were really pleased that we were still able to go ahead in some way, unfortunately, their position meant that a lot of people were disappointed because they couldn't see them so well. So we're  definitely learning from there and we'll do things differently in the future.

And then partly it was a victim of own success. The event was so busy, it meant it was a bit hard to move around and  visibility for some, for Santa wasn't so great, so, again, we've got plans for the future how we might do things differently.

But overall, the activities brought in record numbers of people into the town, our footfall count is showing almost 60,000 people coming into the town that day, which is almost double the normal Saturday. And the feedback from the businesses, the people which we represent was really positive. So overall, definitely some points to learn from and see how we can do things a bit differently, but really pleased with what was the first epic event."

Full details of the events up to Christmas are at:

joytothewells.co.uk

Events explained in more detail here: