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.

Mary Tourtel’s childhood in Canterbury and training at the Sidney Cooper School of Art shaped an illustrator whose animals and rural scenes helped define early twentieth-century children’s picture books, culminating in Rupert Bear for the Daily Express. Family ties to Canterbury Cathedral and close observation of farmhorses and the Kentish countryside fed her idealised landscapes and architectural watercolours.

Waterstones in Canterbury became a civic hub for books, visitors, and public conversation between 1990 and 2020, binding a chain-store frontage to the city’s long literary afterlife. Author talks, café culture, and serendipitous encounters with writers, politicians, and spiritual figures reveal how a bookshop staged global tourism and local identity while even reshaping the built past through the Roman bath-house excavation.

Covid-19 reshaped student life in Canterbury in 2020–21, turning a bustling university city into a landscape of empty shops, restricted movement, and screen-based socialising. Lockdown routines redirected everyday experience toward parks, cathedral grounds, and repurposed buildings such as the Odeon vaccination centre, altering student identity and the city’s social economy.

Marian Fielding Peck designed illustrated maps of Kent and North East Kent that J Salmon Ltd sold as postcard map cards in the mid-1960s. Her training in painting, calligraphy, and miniatures shaped a long collaboration with Salmon, producing 61 map cards of counties, cities, and waterways across Britain. A London agency brokered the commission in 1953, and her career ended abruptly with a fatal car accident in 1974.

Laura Allen traces the early influence of Kent on playwright, novelist, and short story writer, Somerset Maugham.

William Henry Longhurst built a seven-decade musical career at Canterbury Cathedral, moving from chorister to organist while composing sacred and secular vocal works published by major London firms. His modest but durable output, alongside local music-education efforts and unprinted club pieces, shows how provincial cathedral music connected to national publication networks and wide subscriber geographies.

In the first half of the 19th century, Canterbury was seen as a provincial city, although the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway opened in 1830 and was the first railway in Britain to run a scheduled passenger service. Despite the city’s cultural life, Queen Victoria did not enter the cathedral on her one and only visit.