Ez Swanström and Michelle Crowther introduce feminist and social reformer, Josephine Butler's 1870 Kent campaign visit.

Michelle Crowther introduces the Kent based work of Darling Buds of May author, Herbert Ernest Bates.

Charles Carrick built a modest but ambitious career in Victorian Canterbury as a writing master, private tutor, poet, and maker of intricate marquetry and mosaic furniture. His teaching at Kent House Academy and his subscriber-focused poetry and craftwork reveal how middle-class education, local patronage, and cultural display shaped status and livelihood in a changing 19th-century city.

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia in 1930, becoming an international celebrity. In 1941 she was killed when her plane crashed in Herne Bay, but the exact cause of the accident has never been established.

Henry Gardiner Adams was born in the same year as Dickens and is now remembered largely for his connection to the famous author. But Adams was himself a poet and editor, with collaborators including the artist Richard Dadd.

Rose Storkey traces the events surrounding sometime Dover resident the infamous Adelaide Bartlett.

Due to a Death was written by Mary Kelly after a visit to Kent

D.H. Lawrence stayed at Edward Garnett’s house at Crockham Hill and later at Kingsgate and Margate.

Julian Symons was a poet and a prolific author of both history and crime fiction. He lived in Kent for between 1950 and 1955, and several of his novels are set at least partly in the county.

Dinah Craik’s move to Shortlands in 1869 links a purpose-built literary home, The Corner House, to her fiction and to debates on married women’s property and financial independence. Bromley becomes a hub for mentoring, music and philanthropic sociability, showing how domestic space, authorship and middle-class charity reinforced one another in late Victorian life.

Georgina Hogarth and Ellen Ternan sustained a long, carefully managed friendship shaped by gossip about Charles Dickens and by the need for discretion. Margate High School and Wharton House anchor a story of visits, public appearances, letter-editing labor, and later financial decline, revealing how women protected reputations while relying on domestic networks and precarious incomes.

Kent’s seaside piers trace the rise of coastal resorts from early sea-bathing and steamboat travel to the railway-driven boom in mass tourism. Landing stages and iron pleasure piers reshaped towns such as Margate, Herne Bay, Deal, Folkestone and Gravesend, then storms, war damage and changing leisure habits wiped out many structures while a few adapted to new uses.