The Timeless Tunbridge Wells Time Slip of Mrs Charlotte Warburton
In the Tunbridge Wells time slip, Mrs Charlotte Warburton spies a strange, Victorian café in 1960s Kent… but then it disappears. Had it even been there in the first place?
Need More Time?
Don’t have time to read this now? Download the pdf and read it at your leisure…
New Old Café opens Up in Tunbridge Wells Time Slip
On the 18th June 1968, Mrs Charlotte Warburton and her husband went shopping. The elderly pair decided to separate to pick up the bits that they needed from different shops and meet back up afterwards. At this moment, there was no indication that anything was amiss or that the incident that followed would develop into the infamous Tunbridge Wells time slip.
Unable to find her favourite coffee in her usual grocers, Charlotte decided to try the supermarket on Calverley Road. As she walked through the doorway, she noticed a wall to her left with an entrance she hadn’t noticed before. Inside was a rather quaint café. Charlotte recalled that the Décor seemed old-fashioned, with wood-panelled walls. The small premises was dimly lit with soft, round bulbs and shades with frosted glass. She noted that there were no windows.
The patrons seemed slightly dated for a summer in the 60s too. The women were wearing long, dark dresses and the men wore lounge suits. But other than that, she saw nothing unusual. Just a handful of men and women enjoying a coffee in a café on a Tuesday morning. It all looked rather cosy.
Mrs Charlotte Warburton
'Two women in rather long dresses were sitting at one table and about half a dozen men, all in dark lounge suits, were sitting at the other tables further back in the room,' she said. 'All the people seemed to be drinking coffee and chatting... a normal sight for a country town at eleven o'clock in the morning.'
The Whole Tunbridge Wells Time Slip Experience Was Initially Unremarkable
Charlotte didn’t investigate the café further and carried on with her shopping. When she met up with her husband later on that day, she didn’t even mention that she had seen anything out of the ordinary. The whole thing had been entirely unremarkable, as far as she was concerned.
On their next shopping trip, Charlotte suddenly remembered the charming café and insisted that her husband should go with her for a coffee. However, she was surprised to find that she couldn’t find the doorway. The pair walked up and down Calverley Street, but the café was nowhere to be seen. Charlotte even asked several shop owners and other shoppers, but was told that the supermarket had never had a café and she must have got confused with a different street.
Growing increasingly baffled, Charlotte continued enquiring about the café. Until eventually, one person stopped and asked her if she was talking about the café that had been attached to the Kosmos Kinema. The old cinema had stood on the same site as the new supermarket and the cafe had been very similar to what Charlotte was describing. The Warburtons were directed to the Constitutional Club.
Light Shed on the Strange Tunbridge Wells Time Slip
Once at the Constitutional Club, the steward was kind enough to explain that they had previously owned the assembly room adjoining the supermarket building, back when it was the Kosmos Kinema. When Charlotte described the cafe, her description tallied exactly with the club’s old refreshment rooms. Right down to the small bar at the rear of the establishment and the mahogany wood panelling.
Kosmos Kinema had closed some years before and the building was converted into a supermarket. The assembly rooms had gone with it and were incorporated into the shop. So Charlotte couldn’t possibly have witnessed what she claims to have seen on that day in question. The story of the Tunbridge Wells time slip is born.
Time Slips Aren’t So Uncommon
Time is something that we still know relatively little about. Human beings experience time as linear and we can’t comprehend that it’s anything other than just passing hours, minutes and seconds. But time is actually intrinsically linked to space. Anyone who has ever read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time will have no doubt experienced the mind-bending idea that spacetime reacts differently based on its location and proximity to gravity. It’s what the film, Interstellar, is all about.
Ethan Hawk, in an interview recently, was asked what he thought happens when we die and I nearly fell off my chair when he answered. He said he thinks that we don’t die really, because there’s a lot about time that we don’t understand.
Could A Wrinkle in Time Explain the Tunbridge Wells Time SLip?
Take wormholes, for example. The theory of wormholes is that they create a bridge between two points in spacetime. Theoretically, someone could pass between these two points that might be lightyears apart, and travel in spacetime to another place. They’re known as Einstein-Rosen Bridges after the physicists that described them.
In the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein argued that space is a fabric that bends and warps in the presence of matter and energy. Whatever is within that matter would experience time in a linear way around those curves. With that in mind, if that fabric wrinkles, could it also tear and cause brief anomalies like time slips? Maybe.
When people talk about ghosts, I often wonder if what they’ve seen is actually a momentary fault in space time. That is something I can get on board with. Not dead people – alive people back when they were alive.
It’s why I’m so sceptical about poltergeists, which I believe are caused by a buildup of fear, expectation, pent-up energy and the power of suggestion. Rather than the spirits of violent dead people.
Scaredy Cat’s Take
So what do I think about Charlotte Warburton’s experience with a supposed time slip?
I think she misremembered something, honestly. What reports seem keen to miss out when recounting the tale of the Tunbridge Wells time slip is that the Kosmos Kinema actually only closed its doors in 1960 before being converted into a supermarket. That’s only eight years before this time slip. Charlotte would have known the cinema and refreshment rooms and probably attended those venues in their heyday. I don’t know her exact age at the time, but as an older lady, she could have been going there for over sixty years before it closed. And sixty years prior to this experience would take us to 1908.
You don’t have to be old to have brain burps that suddenly mean you revert to a pattern of behaviour from years ago. I’ve done it plenty of times myself, without ever knowing why. The amount of times I’ve gone to an old address in Leeds and just stood outside for a moment confused! But Charlotte was elderly at the time of this mishap. Since she didn’t mention the café until the next time she and her husband went into town to do some shopping, she may have even dreamt it.
That’s not to say I’m entirely unconvinced by all time slips – in a lot of cases, time slips are corroborated by more than one person and involve physical interactions with things that no longer exist. But in this instance, I think Charlotte was just having a moment.
Have You Ever Experienced a Time Slip?
Let us know if you have! We’d love to hear what happened.
Drop Us a Line to Give Us Your Take
LISTEN TO THE LATEST EPISODE
VISIT THE SHOP FOR PODCAST MERCH
PODCAST COVER
The podcast cover art for Scaredy Cat Skeptic
LOGO
The podcast logo artwork for Scaredy Cat Skeptic
Mascot Maud
Scaredy Cat Skeptic Mascot, Maud