Spanning more than 100 acres and home to rare species of plants, fungi, birds and animals, Brokes Wood is one of rural Kent’s hidden gems.
The forest outside Royal Tunbridge Wells is a popular destination for ramblers, who like to follow its meandering footpaths and picnic by a serenely beautiful spring-fed lake covered with lily-pads.
For decades, almost nothing disturbed its calm, except a minor kerfuffle in 2014 when metal-detecting enthusiasts came across a large unexploded World War II bomb there.
Yet at the weekend, this haven of Home Counties tranquillity was shattered by the noise of non-stop dance music and the spectacle of a public orgy.
Visitors to the site, which is supposedly maintained as a nature reserve, found a large portion of it surrounded by metal fencing and burly security guards wearing hi-viz jackets.
At the weekend, this haven of Home Counties tranquillity was shattered by the noise of non-stop dance music and the spectacle of a public orgy
Inside were several hundred revellers in various states of undress, attending an outdoor sex party called ‘Flamefest’.
Billed as ‘a festival for kinky, quirky, creative hedonists’, the three-day event saw an area of the woodland turned into a vast S&M ‘dungeon’ staffed by professional dominatrixes and filled with medieval-style stocks, and another become an ‘adult play area’ where complete strangers were invited to ‘explore kinks’.
Next to a selection of marquees containing bars and music stages was a line of clothing-optional hot tubs and sauna cabins catering for so-called swingers.
‘Explore pain, experience pleasure and fulfil your fantasies on this mystical site where witches’ covens have met for centuries,’ read a guide for the mostly middle-class ticket-holders who had paid between £100 for a basic single ticket to £600 for a couple to rent a two-person luxury tepee containing a double bed.
‘You will be in the safe hands of our dominatrixes and monitors, to play within the boundaries of our common-sense rules.’
Given Tunbridge Wells’s reputation as a bastion of respectability, it is perhaps not surprising that an event designed to facilitate sex between virtual strangers sparked outrage.
‘I’m disgusted and appalled,’ was how Nasir Jamil, one of the town’s Conservative councillors, put it when we spoke. He is one of several thousand homeowners who live within a stone’s throw of the Flamefest site.
‘We moved to this area because we were under the impression it was nice and quiet and that decent people lived here. The whole world now thinks instead that it’s a place where sex parties happen. My friends and relatives are all asking about it.
‘I don’t mind people enjoying themselves in the sunshine, but not when you have these indecent elements. I have a five-year-old daughter at home. What am I supposed to tell her when she asks what is going on?’
Other residents, none of whom was consulted about the decision to grant permission for a live music event on their door- step, complained of suffering a sleepless weekend.
More than 500 revellers were set to attend Flamefest in Royal Tunbridge Wells for the three-day festival which promises an outdoor S&M dungeon and ‘adult play area’ (promotional picture)
‘What consenting adults choose to get up to in the privacy of their own tents is their business. But the noise was awful,’ says Justin Funnell, who lives near by with his wife Joanne. ‘We were told the music would go on until 11pm but we called the council noise pollution people at 11.20pm when we could still hear it. Nothing really happened, and it didn’t go quiet until 2am.’
Homeowners on the leafy lane that leads to Brokes Wood were bothered by scantily-clad revellers searching for the entrance to the festival site, which seems to have been insufficiently signposted. At the top of one driveway yesterday was a sign reading: ‘This gate leads to a private property. It is not the site of a sex festival.’
Patrons of local bus and train services, meanwhile, had their journeys disrupted by intoxicated festival-goers loudly discussing the intimate activities they intended to pursue at the event.
This is not the first community to suffer such problems. For in a trend that speaks volumes about the normalisation of extreme promiscuity — a factor in the recent success of the grubby TV show Love Island — the activity of ‘swinging’ appears to be entering our cultural mainstream.
Once regarded as the exclusive domain of perverts and oddballs, it is increasingly being marketed to the middle classes as a quirky, fashionable leisure pursuit.
Last summer, several hundred devotees of what practitioners rather tediously call ‘the lifestyle’ descended on the picturesque Welsh village of Trellech for a three-day event called Swingfields, at which couples (wearing coloured wristbands to denote their sexual preferences) were encouraged to swap partners in the great outdoors.
And a few days ago the broadcaster Eamonn Holmes, of morning TV fame and supposedly a symbol of respectability, was spotted at a £450-a-head country house sex party organised by Killing Kittens, a company that organises swinging events for wealthy young professionals and was founded by Emma Sayle, a one-time acquaintance of the Duchess of Cambridge.
The ‘kink rave festival’ in Royal Tunbridge Wells is expected to attract around 500 people
Holmes, who was accompanied by his wife, fellow Good Morning Britain Host Ruth Langsford, turned out to be filming a light-hearted documentary about the event for Channel 5.
He was filmed taking part in an ‘erotic dining experience’ which involved wearing a blindfold while Langsford fed him forkfuls of spaghetti, but reportedly declined to follow fellow revellers to ‘play rooms’ equipped with whips and chains.
Such sexual free-for-alls are increasingly held in places that were once entirely respectable, rather than Soho basements.
As its location (and price-tag) suggests, Flamefest seems to be catering to a thoroughly middle-class demographic.
By day, the site in Tunbridge Wells resembled a sort of mini-Glastonbury, where bleary-eyed festival-goers — most of whom appeared to be aged between 25 and 50 — eschewed seedier pursuits to take part in various ‘alternative’ leisure pastimes including yoga, Pilates and ‘guided meditation’.
Meals were served from food vans offering gourmet burgers, wood-fired pizza, French crepes, pulled pork and a variety of vegan and vegetarian meals.
Men and women in fancy dress queued at portable toilets and shower blocks. At a selection of arts and crafts workshops, punters were taught everything from life drawing to making nipple tassels to writing erotic literature.
Organisers of the event insisted ‘nothing happens in view’ but that people ‘go off to their tents to meet like minded people’
Among the odder spectacles was a ‘cacao ceremony’, a ritual borrowed from Amazonian culture which involves sitting in a circle, drinking raw cacao and banging tambourines as part of what was described, apparently without irony, as ‘a shamanic journey into the underworld to find your power animal’.
Having bought into this mumbo-jumbo, revellers (who were encouraged to don ‘festival wear and fetish wear’) spent their evenings in the bars, where drinks cost between £3 and £7.
The more energetic could also
take part in ‘domination wrestling’ in a pool filled with jelly, and a game called ‘human hungry hippos’ the exact rules of which remain unclear.
Eventually, the vast majority chose to knuckle down to the real business of the evening: visiting one of the various woodland locations at which virtual strangers were encouraged to indulge in group sex.
The organiser of Flamefest, a dance music DJ and ‘laughter yoga trainer’ called Helen Smedley (who rented the site from local landowner Peter Marshall) appears to have been allowed to orchestrate these grubby proceedings because of a loophole in planning laws. This allows organisers of anything calling itself a festival to apply for a temporary licence to sell alcohol and provide regulated entertainment and late-night refreshment.
Because of their temporary nature, such applications are not normally brought before a council’s full licensing committee.
As sex festivals are usually first advertised as being held at a secret location (with the exact address only being divulged to ticket-holders a few days beforehand), local residents tend to be unaware of an imminent event until it is too late to object.
‘Nobody opposed it because nobody knew it was going on,’ Dianne Hill, a Labour councillor in Tunbridge Wells, told reporters at the weekend. ‘I’m no prude but this is the wrong place for this sort of thing.’
Smedley was unapologetic, however, insisting Flamefest was ‘a private event’ where ‘we allow people a safe place to have sex’.
Rejecting the suggestion that she was cashing in on moral depravity, she told the local newspaper that her party would ‘involve music, workshops, getting at one with nature’.
Not everyone was convinced. One local familiar with Brokes Wood voiced the concerns of many local residents by observing: ‘If people want to be at one with nature, then surely hikes, badger-watching, pond dipping or birdspotting are best.