Penshurst Place is situated at Tunbridge Wells in Kent. It has being the family home of the Sidney family for 450 years.

Penshurst Place was first built towards the end of the first half of the 14th century and was by a prosperous bourgeois, Sir John Pulteney, though his descendants several centuries later included the Pulteney Earls of Bath and the Earls of Harborough and Crewe. At that time Penshurst seems to have been relatively undefended. It was only towards the end of the 14th century that some attempt seems to have been made at fortification, of which the present 'Garden' Tower is the sole survivor in its entirety. Some two generations later the property was bought by the Duke of Bedford, one of HENRY IV's younger sons. Bedford added a more intimate extension to the original Great Hall, although he gets little credit for it since it is now called after the Stafford Duke of Buckingham, who did not own Penshurst till much later. Nevertheless, although the Great Hall was clearly seen as inconvenient as early as the 1430s from the point of view of those who had to sit and eat there, it remains the gem of the entire place, being 60 feet high at its apex and a little more than 60 feet long, with splendidly generous windows set high up in the end walls – a radical departure from common practice at the time, when windows were still thought of as first and foremost slits to fire arrows out of.

The Sir Henry Sidney who was father of the 1st Earl of Leicester more or less completed the medieval structure as it is seen today, erecting the King's Tower which dominates the entrance to the north. The 1st Earl's tenancy saw the building of the long gallery. Further alterations, chiefly internal, were carried out by Sir John Shelley Sidney, 1st Bt, the claimant to the 1357 Barony of L'isle.

Penshurst Place is open to the public and in 2003 celebrations take place for the 450th anniversary of the Sidney family at Penshurst Place.