In this visual essay, Dr Simon Wilson presents the life and works of kent author Jocelyn Brooke.

Amber Potter traces the life of early 16th century prophetess Elizabeth Barton: the Maid of Kent.

Deal seafront and pier become a shifting register of tide, weather, and light, observed from a quiet window that turns the coast into a series of framed panels. Maritime traffic, Goodwin Sands, and distant French lights punctuate the scene and sharpen the poem’s attention to pattern, colour, and motion along the Channel edge.

Daniel Vince considers the early 20th century years Noël Coward lived in Kent and his works created there.

Michelle Whitham traces British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's long association with Kent, particularly his country house of Chartwell.

Edward Linley Sambourne’s career as a Punch cartoonist intersects with Kent’s seaside resorts through holidays, friendships, and public events in Thanet, Ramsgate, Margate, Dover, and Folkestone. Diaries, travel details, and photographic practice reveal how railway mobility and leisure landscapes fed his satirical work while also exposing a troubling pattern of voyeuristic image-making.

Michelle Crowther traces the life and work of historical fiction writer Nora Geraldine Gordon Salmon (pseudonym J.G. Sarasin).

Mary Cowden Clarke’s autobiographical memories trace how Kent shaped a Shakespeare scholar’s sensibility through travel mishaps, seaside journeys, and rural pleasures. Episodes from Margate, Dover, Tonbridge, and Ramsgate link nineteenth-century mobility, food, and landscape to literary networks around Keats, Coleridge, Dickens, and the Novello circle.

The Great Storm of 1987 was the worst to hit the UK since 1703, with damage including the destruction of 6 of the famous oaks in Sevenoaks and a high number of deaths.

George Meredith’s letters and fiction link the health culture of sea-bathing with brief visits to Ramsgate and other Kent resorts, set against his enduring attachment to rural life. The Kentish countryside in The Amazing Marriage frames Carinthia’s struggle for autonomy and marks Meredith’s late-Victorian engagement with the New Woman.

Robert Plot links seventeenth-century scientific inquiry with county-based natural history through collecting fossils, minerals, and antiquities and publishing landmark surveys of Oxfordshire and Staffordshire. His retirement in Borden, Kent shaped late work on Kent’s landscape and built heritage, including notes for Camden’s Britannia and observations from a 1693 tour.

John Tradescant the Younger linked Kent schooling and family roots to a career in early modern botany, gardening, and global plant collecting. His work at Lambeth’s Ark and the 1656 Museum Tradescantianum catalogue helped turn a cabinet of curiosities into a public-facing museum model later absorbed into the Ashmolean, amid contested inheritance and legal conflict.