Kent

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kent sits at the edge of England, staring across thirty-four kilometres of water toward France. That narrow gap, the Strait of Dover, is the reason Kent has been fought over, sailed through, invaded, and celebrated for thousands of years. The county's name is one of the oldest still in use anywhere in England, first recorded in ancient Greek by the explorer Pytheas around the 320s BC. He wrote that Kantion lay several days' sail from Keltike, the lands of the Celts. More than two millennia later, the place still carries that name and still plays its ancient role as the hinge between Britain and the continent. How did a chalk ridge and a coastal plain become the gateway of England? Why did Julius Caesar describe its people as the most civilised in all of Britain? And what made this one county the birthplace of English Christianity, the front line of English naval power, and the garden that fed a nation?

• 2. The Oldest Name

  ›

  Pytheas, the Greek explorer who recorded the name Kantion around the 320s BC, was describing a coastal district on the edge of the known world. The Celtic root of the word carries the meaning of edge, border, or corner land, as in cant meaning the rim of a circle or a side. In Latin the place was Cantia or Cantium; the Anglo-Saxons called it Cent or Cent lond. Julius Caesar used the form Cantium when he described its people in 51 BC, calling them by far the most civilised inhabitants of Britain. A Neanderthal skull found in the quarries at Swanscombe confirms that humans occupied the area intermittently during the Palaeolithic, when extreme cold periodically made the region uninhabitable. The Medway megaliths followed in the Neolithic era, and later came the Ringlemere gold cup from the Bronze Age and the Roman villas of the Darent valley, each layer of occupation adding depth to a place already ancient when Caesar arrived. The Celtic meaning of the name, land on the edge, turns out to be accurate in more than one sense: geographically, culturally, and politically, Kent has always stood at the boundary between worlds.

• 3. Gateway of Invasions

  ›

  After the Romans withdrew, large numbers of Germanic speakers crossed from mainland Europe and settled across the region. Of all the invading groups, the Jutes were the most prominent, and the area became a Jutish kingdom recorded as Cantia around 730. The early inhabitants called themselves the Cantwara, the Kentish people. A divide that persists to this day runs along the River Medway: those born east of it are Men or Maids of Kent, while those from the west are Kentishmen or Kentish Maids. Some historians trace this split to the original settlement pattern, with Jutes east of the Medway and Saxons to the west. Then in 597, Pope Gregory I sent a religious missionary who would become Saint Augustine of Canterbury to begin the conversion of England to Christianity. The year before his appointment, Augustine had already persuaded the pagan King Æthelberht of Kent to convert. Canterbury became England's first Episcopal See, with England's first cathedral, and has remained the centre of English Christianity ever since. Rochester Cathedral followed as the second designated English cathedral. When William of Normandy invaded Britain in the 11th century, he could not subdue Kent. The Kentish people negotiated favourable terms and were granted semi-autonomous status as a county palatine in 1067, under the nominal rule of William's half-brother Odo of Bayeux. The county adopted its motto Invicta, meaning unconquered, to mark the fact that no conqueror had managed to break their resistance.

• 4. Ports, Warships, and Sea Power

  ›

  Dover Castle has been described as the key of England, a phrase earned through centuries of guarding the narrowest crossing to the continent. From the 10th to the 14th centuries, the Cinque Ports supplied warships to the English crown, forming the backbone of naval defence before a permanent navy existed. The Royal Navy first used the River Medway in 1547, and by the reign of Elizabeth I a small dockyard had been established at Chatham. By 1618, the facility had grown to include storehouses, a ropewalk, a drydock, and houses for officials. The 17th century brought a sharp reminder of vulnerability: in 1667, the Dutch navy raided the Medway shipyards in a successful attack that shocked England into building forts along the entire Kent coast. Through the 18th century, as wars with France dominated the era, the Medway became the primary base for a fleet capable of operating along Dutch and French coasts. When the theatre of war shifted to the Atlantic, Portsmouth and Plymouth took over that role, and Chatham concentrated on building and repairing ships. The strategic significance of the region was so firmly established that the first Ordnance Survey map ever drawn was a one-inch map of Kent, published in 1801. Many of those Georgian naval buildings at Chatham still stand today.

• 5. Rebellion, Coal, and the Doodlebug

  ›

  Kent's position as a frontier county made it fertile ground for rebellion as well as defence. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, drew heavily on Kent. Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450 and Wyatt's Rebellion of 1554 against Queen Mary I both originated in the county. In the early 19th century, smugglers were active along the entire coastline; gangs such as the Aldington Gang brought spirits, tobacco, and salt into the county and transported wool across the sea to France. Coal mining added a different kind of tension in the modern era. From around 1900 several pits opened in East Kent, with the Snowdown Colliery running from 1908 all the way to 1986. Between June 1944 and March 1945, more than ten thousand V1 flying bombs, known as Doodlebugs, were fired toward London from bases in northern France. Aircraft, anti-aircraft guns, and barrage balloons destroyed many of them, but London and Kent together were struck by around two thousand five hundred of these weapons. Much of the Battle of Britain had already been fought in the skies directly above the county during the Second World War, making Kent a repeated front line across nearly every century of recorded history.

• 6. Garden, Chalk, and Industry

  ›

  The White Cliffs of Dover are perhaps the most recognisable feature of Kent's geography, formed where the chalk ridge known as the North Downs meets the English Channel. The entire landscape was shaped by the erosion of the Wealden dome, a geological structure created by alpine movements somewhere between ten and twenty million years ago. Beneath the surface, the Coal Measures within the Westphalian Sandstone run roughly two hundred and fifty to four hundred metres deep in East Kent, between Deal, Canterbury, and Dover, extending under the English Channel itself. Above ground, the same geology that produces chalk also creates the soil conditions that earned Kent its nickname the Garden of England. The county produces tree-grown fruits, strawberries, and hazelnuts, and is the main area for hazelnut production in the UK. Distinctive hop-drying buildings called oasts dot the countryside, many now converted into homes. North Kent tells a different economic story: cement production at Northfleet and Cuxton, brickmaking at Sittingbourne, engineering and aircraft construction at Rochester, chemicals at Dartford, oil refining at Grain, and a steel mill in Sheerness. On the 10th of August 2003, the hamlet of Brogdale near Faversham recorded a temperature of 38.5 degrees Celsius, which at the time was the highest temperature ever officially recorded in the United Kingdom and still stands as the hottest August day ever recorded there.

• 7. Culture and Creative Life

  ›

  Canterbury Cathedral, founded in AD 598, displays architecture from every period since and is now a World Heritage Site. Its religious significance gave rise to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one of the pivotal works in the development of the English language. The father of Charles Dickens worked at the Chatham Dockyard, and Dickens returned repeatedly to the scenery of Chatham, Rochester, and the Cliffe marshes in his novels. William Golding worked as a teacher at Maidstone Grammar School during the late 1930s and met his future wife Ann Brookfield there; he later received the Nobel Prize for literature. William Caxton, who first introduced the printing press to England, was born in Kent, and the new technology helped standardise many Kent dialect words and spellings into what became modern English. The landscape painter J. M. W. Turner spent part of his childhood in Margate and returned throughout his life; the East Kent coast inspired some of his most celebrated seascapes. In Blean near Canterbury, the production company Smallfilms, founded by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, made the children's television programmes Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, and Bagpuss. The film director Derek Jarman kept a home called Prospect Cottage on the Dungeness coast from 1987 until his death in 1994, and Creative Folkestone now serves as its custodians. Lord Northbourne coined the term organic farming at a biodynamic agriculture conference held on his Betteshanger estate in the summer of 1939, then published his manifesto the following year, setting off a global movement for sustainable agriculture.

• 8. Music, Railways, and What Endures

  ›

  The earliest locomotive-driven passenger railway in Britain was the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, which opened in 1830. That line eventually merged into what became the South Eastern Railway, and Kent's rail network grew to connect Ashford, Ramsgate, Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells, and the Medway towns to London terminals including London Bridge, Charing Cross, and Cannon Street. The Channel Tunnel completed in 1994 and High Speed 1 in November 2007 added a London terminus at St Pancras, along with a new station at Ebbsfleet International between Dartford and Gravesend. Kent also holds a distinctive musical record: the composer and organist Walter Galpin Alcock, born at Edenbridge in 1861, played the organ at the coronations of Edward VII, George V, and George VI. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, then an eighteen-year-old sea cadet, was anchored at Gravesend from November 1862 to February 1863 and completed the slow movement of his First Symphony while there. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stayed at Bourne Park House near Canterbury from the 25th to the 30th of July 1765 with his father, mother, and sister; on two of those nights they slept in Canterbury itself and attended the horse races. The county currently has more motorway distance than any other county in the UK, with sections of the M2, M20, M25, and M26 totalling one hundred and seventy-three kilometres within its boundaries. That figure captures something essential about Kent: the place that Pytheas called a land on the edge has spent more than two thousand years being crossed, contested, and connected.