Folkestone became a critical Channel port in the First World War, moving nearly 10 million soldiers and large numbers of nurses, war workers, civilians, and refugees between Britain and the Western Front. Embarkation logistics, Shorncliffe’s imperial troop presence, and the Tontine Street air raid reshaped the town’s social life and exposed it to early total war pressures, including the white feather campaign against non-enlisted men.
Margaret Emily Shore’s journals trace a young diarist’s encounters with the Thanet coast and the Medway dockyards in the 1830s, turning convalescent travel into close observation. Her notes on chalk cliffs, seaweed and botany, printing, steam-packets, and Chatham Dockyard machinery reveal how seaside leisure and industrial infrastructure fed a middle-class girl’s scientific curiosity and technical imagination.
The health benefits of sea bathing had first been extolled from the 18th century, and towns along the Kent coast were highly successful in reinventing themselves as seaside resorts. But the 19th century saw confusion about social rules, which for many seemed incompatible with the new liberties enjoyed by summer visitors in particular.
Laura Allen's visual essay introduces Kent author Bessie Marchant (pesud. John Comfort) who drew on the places and dialect of her home county.
John Marsh’s journal places late Georgian musical life in Nethersole and Canterbury within the practical limits of night travel and poor road engineering. Moonlight dinners, coaching inns, and the adoption of McAdam’s road-building method reveal how mobility shaped concert culture and theatre circuits across east and north Kent.
In this visual essay, Dr Peter Merchant documents the relationship between author Henry James and Hever Castle, Kent home to Anne Boleyn.
Joseph Conrad’s late-life residence in Bishopsbourne links a major modern novelist to the Kent countryside and nearby Canterbury. Seafaring experience and imperial travel shaped novels such as Heart of Darkness, while local memorials, homes, and burial sites anchor his legacy in place and public memory.
Chatham Dockyard became a leading Royal Navy yard in the 19th century as industrial management reforms and new furnaces, workshops, and covered slips enabled all-weather construction of larger warships. Expansion works such as the reclamation of St Mary’s Island and the mechanised ropery reshaped labour, gender roles, and the site’s strategic importance before priorities shifted toward Portsmouth and wartime repair in the early 20th century.
Dr Chris Price presents an overview of the Kent based life and work of 19th century Canterbury Cathedral single and musical performer Charles Henry Dobson.
Catch singing and the closely related English glee shaped lively social music-making in Britain from taverns to cathedral cities, thriving in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Textual double entendre, participatory performance, and networks of clubs and professional singers sustained the genre even as shifting domestic tastes and new choral fashions helped it fade by the century’s end.
The majority of capital punishments in the 18th century were enforced according to Tudor laws. But the more detailed codification of specific offences legislation during this time came to be known as the Bloody Code.
New humourist Robert Barr (alias Luke Sharp) visited Folkestone in 1890 and made several contributions to the local journal edited by his friend 'Hal Bert'.