St John the Baptist church at Small Hythe links a now-landlocked village to Kent’s medieval coastal waterways, shipbuilding, and Cinque Ports connections. A lost fourteenth-century chapel, the 1514 fire, and a rebuilt brick church with Low Countries influences reveal how community pressure, migration of materials and craftsmen, and shifting landscapes shaped local worship. Ellen Terry’s long residence at nearby Smallhythe Place and the church’s interior artworks tie the site to modern performance culture and memory.

St Mary and St Eanswythe church in Folkestone preserves the cult and relics of a seventh-century Kentish princess-saint while revealing a long cycle of destruction and rebuilding on an unstable cliff edge. Architectural changes from Norman origins through medieval expansion, Reformation survival, storm damage, and Victorian restoration show how local wealth, patronage, and devotion reshaped a parish church into a near-cathedral interior.

Early Christian worship in Kent shaped a dense landscape of parish churches whose local folklore and layered building histories rival the fame of Canterbury Cathedral. Churches in Canterbury, Headcorn, Fordwich, Small Hythe, Folkestone, and Eastchurch reveal relics, monuments, and family patronage that link small places to wider national religious history.

Sheila Kaye-Smith’s invented village of Delmonden reshapes the real border landscape around Newenden and the River Rother to suit the social and narrative needs of Shepherds in Sackcloth. Elastic distances, borrowed farm names, and merged settlements reveal deliberate authorial licence, while close seasonal descriptions anchor the fiction in a convincing Wealden sense of place.

John Brent shaped nineteenth-century Canterbury as a mayor, political campaigner, poet, and antiquarian whose writing helped define the city’s historic identity. His career links local civic reform and international causes with literary production and the preservation of Canterbury’s past in Canterbury in the Olden Time.

Dover Castle’s underground tunnel network shaped British coastal defence from Georgian casemates to a Second World War command centre. The tunnels housed thousands of troops and supported Operation Dynamo and the Fortitude South deception, helping divert German attention from Normandy and reduce Allied losses.

Prof. Carolyn Oulton introduces the life and work of Doctor and pioneering crime writer R. Austin Freeman after his move to Kent in 1896.

Michelle and Martin Crowther trace the Kent performances of the famous early nineteenth-century actress Dora Jordan.

Bethia Carter explores the writing of Charles Dicken's 1875 novel 'A Tale of Two Cities' in Kent and how the county features in the story.

A number of writers of the Edwardian era and the years between the World Wars chose to depict Romney Marsh in their work

My first encounter with _Great Expectations_ was as an eleven year old, watching the 1946 David Lean film in a school hall. I was spellbound and terrified in equal measure as Magwitch appeared from behind the tomb to menace the young Pip. I was there, I was Pip.

Dr Martin Watts looks at the implementation of the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act which targeted women in the docks and garrison towns of Kent.