Things to do in Kent

Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent is a restored medieval castle on the banks of the River Medway, the ancestral home of the Wyatt family and the birthplace in 1503 of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, the poet credited with introducing the sonnet form to English literature. The castle dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was substantially rebuilt in the Tudor period by the Wyatt family. It was later acquired and carefully restored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Lord Conway of Allington, who transformed the ruinous building into a habitable and architecturally convincing medieval castle. The castle was subsequently used as a Carmelite friary for many decades before returning to private ownership. Set within attractive grounds beside the Medway with views across the river, Allington Castle provides a combination of medieval heritage, literary associations and Kent riverside scenery.

Bodiam Castle in the East Sussex Weald is one of the most complete and most romantic medieval castle ruins in England, a late fourteenth-century moated fortress whose four corner towers, battlemented walls and wide surrounding moat create a composition so perfectly preserved and so visually satisfying that it has become one of the defining images of the English castle in the popular imagination. The castle was built between 1385 and 1388 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge, a veteran of the Hundred Years War who obtained a licence to crenellate from Richard II on the grounds that the castle would defend against French invasion up the River Rother, though historians have debated whether this was the true purpose or a useful justification for building a status symbol of great personal ambition. The castle is widely considered to be designed as much for display and aristocratic prestige as for genuine military effectiveness, its regular plan, large windows and symmetrical towers reflecting the aesthetic preferences of a successful knight who wished to project an image of authority and culture as much as military power. Dalyngrigge had fought in France and would have been familiar with the French castle architecture of the period, and the design of Bodiam shows an awareness of Continental military fashions filtered through the requirements of an English country gentleman who wanted a beautiful house as well as a defensible one. The moat, wide and still and perfectly reflecting the castle walls and towers on calm days, is one of Bodiam's most celebrated features and gives the site its characteristic photograph. The National Trust, which has managed the castle since 1925, maintains the moat and the castle fabric and provides interpretive displays in the interior that explain the castle's history and architecture. The interior is largely roofless and ruined but the wall walks and towers can be climbed, providing good views over the Rother valley and the castle's setting in the Weald. The surrounding countryside of the High Weald, with its ancient oak woodland, hop gardens and weather-boarded farmhouses, provides good walking and a beautiful landscape context for the castle visit.

Botany Bay is one of the finest and most dramatically set beaches on the north Kent coast near Broadstairs, a bay enclosed between chalk stacks and arches whose combination of the brilliant white chalk formations, the sandy beach and the rock pools at low tide creates one of the most characterful beach environments in the southeast. The beach is backed by chalk cliffs of considerable height and the stacks standing in the sea at each end of the bay have been sculpted by wave erosion into the arched and undercut forms characteristic of the chalk coast of this section of Kent. The chalk stack at the western end of the bay is the most impressive natural feature, its arch and undercut base demonstrating the wave erosion that has progressively separated this mass of chalk from the cliff behind. The rock pools exposed at low tide contain a rich community of marine invertebrates in the clear, relatively uncontaminated water of this section of the North Sea coast, and the beach is popular with fossil hunters who find shark teeth, sea urchins and other marine fossils weathering from the chalk in the cliff faces. The beach is reached by steps from the clifftop above and the relative inaccessibility compared with the more developed Broadstairs beaches nearby preserves a quality of discovery and natural character that makes Botany Bay one of the most rewarding beach experiences on the north Kent coast. The coast path connecting Botany Bay with Kingsgate Bay and North Foreland provides excellent chalk cliff walking with extensive Channel views.

Broadstairs is a small seaside town on the Isle of Thanet in Kent that has maintained its Victorian resort character more successfully than most of the southeast's coastal towns, its compact cliff-top streets, Victorian villas and the intimate Viking Bay below the town creating an atmosphere that retains genuine seaside charm without the tattiness that has overtaken some of its larger neighbours. The town is particularly associated with Charles Dickens, who spent many working holidays at Broadstairs between the 1830s and 1850s and wrote some of his most celebrated novels while staying in the town, and the annual Dickens Festival celebrates this connection with considerable enthusiasm. Bleak House, the cliff-top house now known as Dickens House where the novelist did much of his writing, is a distinctive feature of the Broadstairs cliff line and provides the most immediate visual reminder of the Dickens connection. The Dickens House Museum in the town covers the writer's association with Broadstairs in depth and provides context for the various locations around the town associated with his visits and his work. Dickens described Broadstairs as our English Watering Place in an essay of that title and his affection for the town was genuine and sustained, making the association one of the most authentic in English literary heritage. Viking Bay, the main beach at Broadstairs, is a sheltered, sandy cove below the cliff-face of the town, its compact scale and excellent sand making it one of the most popular beaches in Thanet. The beach is overlooked by the buildings of the town above, creating an enclosed and intimate beach environment quite different from the long, open beaches elsewhere in Kent. The chalk cliffs on either side of the bay and the coastal walking available between Broadstairs and the neighbouring towns of Margate and Ramsgate add a wider coastal dimension. The town also celebrates a Dickens Week each year and holds a Folk and Acoustic Festival with a well-established reputation in the UK festival calendar.

Camber Sands on the East Sussex coast near Rye is one of the finest sandy beaches in southeast England, a broad expanse of dune-backed sand extending for approximately three miles along a stretch of coast that provides the widest and most naturalistic beach environment in the region. The combination of the extensive dune system, the wide sandy beach and the relative absence of permanent development gives Camber a character quite different from the more developed resort beaches of the Kent and Sussex coast. The dune system at Camber is one of the most extensive on the southeast coast, the sand dunes rising to considerable height behind the beach and providing habitat for the characteristic dune flora and fauna of this type of coastal environment. The dunes are managed as a nature reserve and the combination of the ecological interest of the dune habitats with the recreational appeal of the beach creates a destination of considerable variety. The shallow gradient of the beach makes Camber particularly suitable for families with young children and the beach is heavily used during the summer months when the proximity to London and the southeast makes it one of the most accessible beach destinations in the region. The medieval town of Rye, one of the finest and most completely preserved small towns in England, is accessible a short distance to the west and provides an excellent complement to the beach visit.

Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion and one of the most historically and architecturally significant Christian buildings in the world, a cathedral of nearly two thousand years of continuous worship whose Norman and Gothic architecture, extraordinary crypt and world-famous associations with the martyrdom of Thomas Becket make it one of the essential heritage destinations in England. The cathedral has been a place of Christian worship since the mission of St Augustine in 597 and is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior figure in the Church of England and the spiritual leader of the Anglican churches worldwide. The assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the cathedral in December 1170, cut down by four knights of Henry II at the altar steps of the north transept in circumstances that made the archbishop immediately a martyr of international significance, transformed Canterbury into one of the greatest pilgrimage centres in medieval Christendom. The shrine of St Thomas, erected over the saint's tomb and enriched over centuries with jewels and gold offered by grateful pilgrims, became one of the most visited pilgrimage destinations in Europe, a status celebrated in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Henry VIII destroyed the shrine in 1538 and appropriated its treasures, but the pilgrimage tradition is commemorated throughout the cathedral. The architecture of the cathedral spans nearly a thousand years of development from the Norman crypt of Archbishop Lanfranc, begun in 1070 and one of the finest Romanesque crypts in England, through the early Gothic of the Trinity Chapel and Corona where Becket's remains were translated, to the perpendicular Gothic of the fifteenth-century nave. The thirteenth-century stained glass in the Trinity Chapel windows, telling the story of miracles attributed to St Thomas, is among the finest medieval glass in existence. Canterbury's position on the medieval Pilgrim's Way from London to the cathedral and the survival of historic buildings including the West Gate and the ruins of St Augustine's Abbey provide a setting of considerable historical depth around the cathedral itself.

Chartwell in the Kent Weald is the former country home of Sir Winston Churchill, the house in which Britain's most celebrated wartime leader lived from 1924 until a year before his death in 1965 and which he described as the most dearly loved of all the places where I have lived. The National Trust manages the house, which has been preserved largely as Churchill left it and provides the most direct and most personal experience of the domestic life, working habits and private character of one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century history. The house retains Churchill's study, with his desk as he left it and his paintings on the wall, the dining room where political and artistic guests were entertained and the garden studio where he painted the landscapes that were his principal relaxation and in which he found the peace that political life denied him. The collection of his own paintings, displayed in the studio as he arranged them, provides an unexpected perspective on a man whose enormous public persona overshadowed a genuine artistic sensibility. The garden was designed by Churchill himself and the brick walls he built in the garden, including the kitchen garden wall, were laid by his own hands in a practical engagement with the physical landscape that provided him with satisfaction and relaxation throughout his political career. The views from the garden over the Weald of Kent convey the quality of rural England that he fought to preserve and that he could see from his own windows throughout the years of the Second World War.

Dungeness in Kent is one of the largest expanses of shingle beach in the world, a flat and extraordinary landscape of shin-deep flint pebbles extending across the low-lying headland at the southeastern corner of England in a scene of industrial, natural and architectural strangeness quite unlike any other place in Britain. The combination of the nuclear power station, the two lighthouses, the scattered beach community of black-tarred fishermen's huts and converted railway carriages, the Derek Jarman garden and the RSPB nature reserve creates a landscape of remarkable and entirely unique character. The shingle habitat of Dungeness supports one of the most diverse communities of plants and invertebrates of any shingle system in Britain, the open shingle providing niches for rare plants adapted to the extreme conditions of high solar radiation, minimal water retention and the instability of the substrate. The RSPB reserve on the northern edge of the headland provides internationally important habitats for breeding birds including common tern, great crested grebe, bittern and a wide variety of wildfowl in the lagoons and pools. Derek Jarman, the filmmaker and artist who lived at Prospect Cottage on the Dungeness headland from 1987 until his death in 1994, created a garden from the shingle surrounding his cottage using locally gathered driftwood, stones and plants adapted to the shingle conditions. The cottage and garden, painted black against the shingle, have become one of the most celebrated artist's homes in Britain and the garden continues to be maintained as a memorial to its creator.

Hever Castle in the Kent Weald is a beautifully preserved moated medieval castle that achieved its lasting historical significance as the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and mother of Elizabeth I. Anne grew up within these walls and received from the castle's setting the education, Continental refinement and personal ambition that helped make her the most intellectually accomplished of Henry's wives and the most consequential for English history. The castle passed through various hands after the Boleyn family's fall, was transformed by the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor from 1903 onward with enormous resources, and is now one of the most visited historic houses in England. The castle dates from the thirteenth century and was developed into its present moated form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Boleyn family acquired it in 1462, and it was here that the young Anne was raised, receiving her early education before being sent to the courts of the Duchess of Burgundy and then the French king, experiences that gave her the intellectual and social formation that distinguished her from the English court ladies of her generation. Henry VIII visited Hever several times while courting Anne, and the gardens contain statues commemorating both Anne and Henry. The Astor restoration transformed both the castle and its grounds on a lavish scale. Astor added an entire mock-Tudor village adjacent to the castle to house guests, created the spectacular Italian Garden with its collection of ancient Roman and Greek sculpture, and constructed the thirty-five-acre lake that provides the most dramatic element of the grounds. The interior was redecorated and refurnished to a very high standard, and the result is a castle whose medieval fabric is complemented by Edwardian opulence. The combination of the Anne Boleyn story, the moated medieval architecture and the exceptional gardens makes Hever one of the most rewarding and layered historic house visits in Kent.

Leeds Castle in Kent is one of the most beautiful castles in England and one of the most visited, a medieval fortress built on two islands in a lake in the Kent Weald that presents one of the most romantically picturesque castle silhouettes in the country. Despite sharing its name with the Yorkshire city, the castle takes its name from the village of Leeds nearby and has no connection with the north of England. Its exceptional setting, long royal history and the variety of its visitor attractions make it one of the most popular day trip destinations in the southeast. The castle was built on its island site in the ninth century and developed into an important royal residence from the reign of Edward I onward, subsequently passing through several royal owners including the six medieval queens who held it between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. The list of royal associations is remarkable: Edward I and his queen Eleanor of Castile, Edward II and his wife Isabella, Edward III and his queen Philippa of Hainault, Richard II and his queen Anne of Bohemia, Henry V and his queen Catherine of Valois, and Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon all held or used the castle. This exceptional concentration of medieval royal occupation gave Leeds the title the Ladies' Castle. The castle was transformed from a derelict historic building into its current state by Lady Olive Baillie, who purchased it in 1926 and spent fifty years and an enormous fortune restoring and furnishing it to the highest standard, creating the castle as visitors experience it today. Lady Baillie used Leeds as a house for entertaining on a lavish scale, and the quality of the interiors she created reflects resources and taste of a level rarely applied to castle restoration. The grounds include an aviary, a vineyard, a maze and extensive parkland providing a full day's visitor experience.

Rye is one of the finest and most complete medieval towns in England, an ancient Cinque Port perched on a sandstone hill above the Romney Marsh in East Sussex whose cobbled streets, medieval churches, ancient inns and preserved town walls create one of the most atmospheric and most visited small towns in the southeast. The town's history as a port, a pirate base, a French raid target and a haven for smugglers gives it a past of considerable drama that is reflected in the quality and variety of its surviving heritage. The old town on the hill is centred on the Church of St Mary, whose exterior bell cage is climbed by a quarter jack of medieval origin and whose interior contains exceptional medieval stained glass rescued from the town's other medieval churches. The surrounding streets of Mermaid Street, Watchbell Street and the area around the Landgate provide a concentration of medieval and Elizabethan buildings of great charm, including the Mermaid Inn that has served travellers since at least the twelfth century and the Ypres Tower, the remaining element of the medieval town defences. The town has been home to numerous writers and artists, most notably Henry James who lived at Lamb House from 1897 to 1916 and whose study, preserved by the National Trust, provides a tangible connection to one of the great novelists of the period. The tradition of creative habitation has continued, and the combination of the physical beauty of the town and its detachment from suburban development has preserved its attraction for artists and writers to the present day. The Rye Harbour Nature Reserve immediately south of the town, with its shingle habitats and important seabird colonies, provides an excellent natural contrast to the historic town.

Rye Harbour Nature Reserve on the East Sussex coast is one of the most important shingle and coastal wetland nature reserves in southern England, a complex of habitats including shingle beach, saline lagoons, reedbeds, grazing marsh and scrub that together support an exceptional diversity of breeding, wintering and migrating birds and a nationally important flora of shingle and coastal plant communities. The reserve is managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust and covers approximately 1,700 hectares of the coastal plain between Rye and Camber. The shingle beach at Rye Harbour is one of the most ecologically significant areas of the reserve, its stable shingle ridges supporting populations of breeding little tern, one of Britain's rarest seabirds, as well as ringed plover, oystercatcher and common tern. The little tern colony is carefully protected during the breeding season and has been the focus of intensive conservation management over many years, with nest protection measures, warden presence and visitor management contributing to the maintenance of one of the most important populations of this species in the southeast. The lagoons created within the reserve provide habitat for avocet, black-headed gull and various duck species breeding in summer, while the winter brings large flocks of wildfowl including wigon, teal and pochard to the open water, and the reedbeds support bittern, marsh harrier and bearded tit in numbers that reflect the reserve's quality as a wetland habitat. The reserve is one of the best birding sites in Sussex throughout the year. The nearby medieval town of Rye, perched on its hill above the surrounding marsh and shingle, provides excellent visitor facilities and its own considerable historic interest, the combination of the reserve and the town making this part of the Sussex coast one of the most rewarding in the southeast.

Scotney Castle in the Kent Weald is one of the most romantically picturesque country house gardens in England, a mid-nineteenth-century landscape garden designed by Edward Hussey around the ruins of his medieval moated castle that created one of the finest examples of the Picturesque aesthetic in British gardening, using the old castle as a deliberate eyecatcher and focal point in a composition of exceptional beauty. The National Trust manages the estate and the combination of the old castle ruin, the new house above it and the garden they were designed to complement makes Scotney one of the most rewarding and most distinctive garden visits in the southeast. The garden was created between 1837 and 1843 when Edward Hussey demolished much of the old house within the moated castle enclosure in order to provide picturesque ruins as the centrepiece of his new landscape garden. The decision to demolish a perfectly functional building to create ruins illustrates the strength of the Picturesque aesthetic in the early Victorian period, and the resulting composition of tower, moat, reflected water and richly planted garden slopes fulfilled Hussey's vision completely. The garden slopes above the castle are planted with an exceptional collection of rhododendrons, azaleas and other acid-loving shrubs that provide spectacular colour in spring. The new house built above the garden by Hussey is a handsome Victorian mansion by the architect Anthony Salvin that provides the domestic anchor for the designed landscape below. The estate extends through woodlands and farmland in the characteristic Weald landscape of Kent and the walking through the estate provides pleasant countryside of great charm. The castle ruins reflected in the still moat water on a fine day provide one of the most photographed garden compositions in England.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden in the Kent Weald is one of the most celebrated and most influential gardens in the world, created by Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson from 1930 onward within the ruins of an Elizabethan mansion whose towers and walls provided the framework for a sequence of outdoor rooms of exceptional quality and individuality. The National Trust manages the garden, which receives over 200,000 visitors annually and is consistently cited as one of the most important gardens of the twentieth century for its influence on the aesthetics of English garden design. The garden is organised as a series of enclosed spaces, each with a distinct character and colour scheme, connected by axes and paths that create a designed sequence of arrival and discovery. The most celebrated component is the White Garden, a planting of extraordinary sophistication using only white and silver plants to create a nocturnal quality of cool luminosity, but the Rose Garden, the Cottage Garden, the Herb Garden and the Orchard each demonstrate different aspects of Vita Sackville-West's planting philosophy, which combined intimate knowledge of plants with an instinctive sense of colour and texture. Vita Sackville-West wrote about Sissinghurst and its plants with great eloquence in her gardening column in The Observer and in her books, and the combination of the garden's physical quality with the literary intelligence behind it gives Sissinghurst a cultural significance beyond pure horticulture. The tower in which she wrote, still containing her writing room essentially as she left it, provides a direct connection to one of the most original and most poetic garden writers of the twentieth century. The surrounding Wealden landscape, the Elizabethan brick towers visible from across the park, complete an estate experience of the highest quality.

Viking Bay is the most picturesque of the several sandy bays that make up the Broadstairs seafront in the Isle of Thanet in Kent, a sheltered north-facing arc of sand below the Victorian and Edwardian seaside town whose combination of the excellent beach, the historic harbour, the chalk cliffs and the strong association with Charles Dickens creates one of the most complete and most characterful small seaside resort experiences on the Kent coast. The beach is one of the finest on the Kent coast, its sheltered position in the bay providing calm conditions for bathing and the chalk cliffs that frame it giving a distinctive geological setting. The harbour, a working fishing harbour that also accommodates pleasure craft, adds an active maritime element to the seafront and the fish and seafood available locally reflects the continued productivity of the southern North Sea fisheries. Charles Dickens was closely associated with Broadstairs, spending holidays in the town throughout the 1840s and writing David Copperfield while staying at the house on the clifftop now called Bleak House. The Dickens House Museum in the town preserves the house where Mary Strong, the original of Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield, lived, and the annual Dickens Festival celebrates the connection with dressing in period costume and various events throughout the town.