Kent always was deepest Farageland. It sums up Farage’s political vision and persona: close enough to London to understand it, far enough to be in touch with the provincial commonfolk. In this, Farage differs much from his rival on the Right, Rupert Lowe. Though both cut their teeth in the City, Farage still presents himself as a wheeler-dealer, the tribune of the petit-bourgeoisie. Lowe, on the other hand, has reinvented himself as a farmer. His concerns are basically rural, including his preoccupation with self-defense. Inveighing against “metropolitan attacks on rural Britain” in his gilet and wellies, always flanked by a flock of sheep, he claims the old mantle of the Countryside Alliance.

The contest between Reform and Restore has reached a stalemate. There are murmurings of a rapprochement. It seems probable that, if there is a general election soon, there will be some kind of pact. That would involve Restore standing down in places like Kent. It might also involve Reform leaving Lowe’s Great Yarmouth, and rural constituencies, to Restore. Farage, the “cheeky chappie”, can appeal to Kent and Essex’s Cockney diaspora. Lowe, meanwhile, can rattle off the farmers’ list of grievances.

It would be a natural division of territory. Farage is shaped by the South East, especially the Greater London periphery, at least as profoundly as Andy Burnham is by the North West. Kent was part of the South East England constituency that Farage spent 21 years representing in Strasbourg and Brussels. He spent just as long sniffing around for seats at Westminster, always favoring Kentish ones — even if they fell outside Kent proper. In 2001 he stood in Bexhill and Battle — a de facto Kentish constituency, since much of its electorate comprised pensioners from Bromley. In 2006 he contested a by-election in Bromley and Chislehurst. Twice he stood in South Thanet. Clacton, in Essex, was the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, so it’s only natural that Farage, after so many bruises, should have pitched his tent there in 2024. It has many similarities with Farage’s Kentish power-base, not least in its Reform-friendliness; but perhaps he would have been happier somewhere farther south.

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It’s ironic, of course, that Kent is in some ways the most European part of Britain. On a clear day, you can see Calais from Dover. This has been known sometimes to stimulate a certain fellow-feeling with the people over in the distance. That might have been its effect on the Kentish prime minister who took us into Europe, Ted Heath. But, as so often, the closer one gets to a boundary, the more one fashions one’s identity against the other side. Where Heath saw in the Channel a European stream to be bridged, Farage finds proof of England’s insularity. In 2016, more people in Kent agreed with Farage than with Heath.

Kent’s long Channel coastline also leaves it exposed. It is both England’s watchtower and its soft underbelly. Wordsworth wrote “To the Men of Kent” amid the Napoleonic invasion scare:

Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent,
Ye children of a Soil that does advance
Her haughty brow against the coast of France,
Now is the time to prove your hardiment.

In 1588 Philip II directed the Armada to land on Kent. It is no accident that Farage was one of the first to sound the alarm over the small boats crisis: he could witness it firsthand from the Kentish coast. “Another huge armada”, he tweeted in 2021, “has hit the Kent beaches”. Just this week, Reform has announced that it would deploy the Royal Navy to stop the small boats.

Like Farage, the South East has a radical streak. As far back as 2014, a young political scientist by the name of Matthew Goodwin was comparing Farage with the region’s most famous upstart, Wat Tyler. It is actually unknown whether Tyler came from Kent or Essex; both counties claim him as theirs. In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter: for here, in their rowdiness, Kent and Essex combine. The counties which gave UKIP its pair of MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless; the county of Farage’s seat, and the one that is his home — these were, throughout English history, the most potent sites of insurrection. Other counties could gnash their teeth and cause trouble on occasion: the peasants of Norfolk also rose up in 1381. But, unlike Wat Tyler, they were too far from London to make any difference. It is difficult, as the Norfolk MP Lowe may discover, to make parochial rural concerns impress themselves on the metropole: the closer one gets to the centers of wealth and power in Britain, the less people care about farmers and guns. Only places like Kent and Essex can encircle the capital and exert deadly pressure on it.

The trailer for a forthcoming film about the Peasants’ Revolt presents it as one fought against the King. In reality, the ideology motivating Wat Tyler and his collaborators was a loyalist one. They wanted to rescue the king from his wicked counselors: Wat Tyler claimed to act on behalf of “King Richarde and the trew communes”. When the rebels demanded the heads of the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, this was because they had been traitors to the crown. The Peasants’ Revolt also, of course, involved xenophobic violence against London’s Flemings and Lombards. In short, Kent and Essex look to London for their salvation. But they can also take it upon themselves to set things in London right.

The cause of revolt in 1381 was simple: the people of Kent and Essex were sick of paying so much tax. That spirit has never really gone away. Six centuries later, Kent and Essex were the heartlands of Thatcherism. Unlike much of the country, their proudly individualist, enterprising, and petit-bourgeois denizens welcomed Thatcher’s laissez-faire agenda. Farage, if not quite Essex Man, was at least a Kentish wide boy. Unlike Lowe’s farmers, they feel deeply that their fortunes are bundled together with London’s.

Farage was happy on the open-outcry trading floor of the London Metal Exchange after the “Big Bang”, fueled by adrenaline and a never-ending supply of drink. He always envisioned UKIP as a libertarian party cast in Thatcher’s image. The line separating it from the BNP was that “they’re authoritarian, we’re libertarian”. Farage is, indeed, a liberal at heart. His political awakening came when, aged 14, he picked up a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the Dulwich College library. He was inspired to join the Conservative Party as a teenager by a visit to the school by Thatcher’s libertarian guru, Sir Keith Joseph. Interviewed in the New Statesman in 2014, he was asked whether he was part of the “‘small c’ conservative family”. “God no!” was his answer.

Farage is, instead, a 19th-century liberal. Certainly, his libertarian instincts are at odds with Lowe’s new-found agrarian, protectionist ones. When Farage joined UKIP, it was called the Anti-Federalist League; its name evoked the Anti-Corn Law League, the 19th-century liberal campaign against Britain’s entrenched farmer class. The Anti-Corn Law League defeated the farmers, and the farmers, as a political force, never really recovered. Lowe’s efforts to champion them are unlikely to meet with much success. Lowe, the modern-day tribune of the class that the Anti-Corn Law League took on and defeated, was never involved in UKIP. Under Farage, UKIP continued to model itself on the 19th-century campaign for free trade. In a speech to the UKIP conference in 2013, Farage set out the 19th-century liberal case for Brexit: if Britain were to leave the EU, it would “get back the ability to strike free trade deals”. He even suggested “abolishing tariffs on African produce” to “do more to raise living standards there than any amount of aid”. Peace and prosperity through free trade: this was pure Manchester Liberalism, worthy of Richard Cobden.

These days, “Manchesterism” has acquired a rather different meaning. It is, we are told, the opposite of neoliberalism, the opposite of Thatcherism. The ascendancy of Andy Burnham may now put paid to Reform’s hopes of making inroads in the North. Burnham’s victory in Makerfield was held up as “proof of concept” that, with a Northerner in No. 10, and one willing to disavow Thatcherism altogether, Labour could keep the “Red Wall” standing.

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Now, Patrick Maguire claims in The Times, Farage is inspired as much by “the Eurosceptic Labour minister Peter Shore’s vision of state control of strategic industry” as he is by his liberal and libertarian idols, Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, and John Stuart Mill. But one has to wonder: was his heart ever really in it? It was awfully expedient for Farage to move in a big-state direction at just the moment he wanted to curry favor in the post-industrial North, when talk of “realignment” was filling everyone’s ears. The rise of Burnham might therefore come to him as some relief. Now, he can revert to his true, Southern, Thatcherite self. In Clacton he can also, for good measure, defeat his only serious rival in the byelection: the Shoreite SDP.

Recently, as though anticipating the Burnham shift, Reform has dropped some of its more Shoreite posturing on nationalization. Having long fantasized about a union of “socially Right” with “economically Left”, Reform appears to have surreptitiously drifted back into Farage’s small-state comfort-zone. The Reform-adjacent think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, is singing from this hymn sheet. Its first paper was published with the imprimatur of the Thatcherite Spartan John Redwood. “What to do if the UK faces a sovereign debt crisis?”, it asks. Its prescription is a classically liberal one: slash benefits, push for growth with supply-side reforms, cut red tape, trim the state. And, above all: “Do not raise taxes unless absolutely necessary”. There is not much room here for Lowe’s more agrarian vision. The next election is far more likely to be Burnham’s Manchesterism versus the 19th-century kind.

Reform may now be staking out a new path to victory, a “Southern strategy”. It probably would require some compliance from Lowe: he reaches a different kind of Southern voter (albeit a much less significant group) than Farage does. Either way, the strategy would look like this. Forget about Gorton and Denton; forget about Makerfield. Leave the North now to its “king”. Brush aside the ex-Labourite Lee Anderson, the “Red Wall” made flesh: Farage was never a likely tribune of the “left-behind” Northerners, anyway. Offer the South a kind of populist liberalism, with its recognizably Kentish precepts: sovereignty of the people, suspicion of the state, hostility to taxation, vigilance on the border. Throw some bones to Lowe’s band of angry farmers, while steering clear of full-scale protection. Do it well enough to force the Tories, the other Southern party, into a merger. And then, at the next general election, Farage can run the campaign he has always secretly wanted to, the kind of campaign that served Thatcher well enough on three occasions. The North never was Reform’s heartland. Farage’s heart always belonged to Kent.

When Nathan Finch opened his first pawnbrokers in 2004, he named it after Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers to counter an image that, he insists, no longer haunts his industry. His branch in Dartford, Kent, is on the high street, not in the back alleys. Its red-curtained windows boast a pair of Louboutin stilettos and a Mulberry ostrich-leather handbag. The company – like every other in this industry – is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. And, says Finch, many customers are so grateful for its service in helping to “smooth their cashflow” that they come back with flowers and chocolates for the staff.

But, just as in the 18th century, economic calamity spells boom time for pawnbrokers. Shares in the UK’s largest, H&T, have risen 58% this year. And as inflation hits a 40-year high, the company has reported that “pledge lending” – loans secured against valuables, most commonly jewellery – has reached record levels.

Deidre first visited a pawnbroker four years ago, as all three generations of her family were struggling to make ends meet. She was forced into retirement after breaking her shoulder. Her daughter is a single mother; her son and grandson are both out of work. The 74-year-old bitterly regrets that she had already sold off a necklace — to get £80 to buy her grandson a suit for a job interview — before thinking of pawn. Every piece of jewellery bought by her husband is even more priceless to her since his death last year.

“It’s a bit of a stigma, isn’t it,” she tells me behind bulletproof glass in the Dartford shop’s “privacy booth”. “But when I come in, they really made me feel at ease. They make sure you understand how much, and I always say to them, a couple of times, ‘I want to buy it back! I want to buy it back!’” (At Pickwick, almost 90% of items are redeemed. For men who bring in their own watches, and women their own handbags, it is touching 100%.)

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Today, the pensioner has come in to pawn a gold heart necklace and sapphire earrings, given to her by her late husband for Christmas. She received a loan of £60, and will repay £102 if she waits the full seven months before coming to reclaim it. In an effort to attract more customers, Pickwick adds an extra month on to the minimum statutory period a shop must retain items for before selling them. On a loan of up to £500, it charges a monthly interest of 10% (a representative APR of 149.3%).

“It is quite a high rate,” she says, but she is usually back here within a matter of weeks. “On Monday, when I get my little pension, I try to pay £10 or £20 off and then it’s not so bad.” In any case, she has no alternative. “It’s not enough for a bank loan. I wouldn’t be able to get one because it’s only me, and we’ve always had a bit of bad credit.”

Lorraine is visiting with her young son. She usually only comes in for small amounts — £30 to £60 — to cover the cost of a bit of shopping or the electricity bill. (The average loan here is about £300, paid off within three months; 55% of customers are women.) She works in retail and her husband is a lorry driver, but for the past three years that hasn’t been enough. “It is just for general day-to-day living,” she says wearily. “We haven’t had a holiday for eight or nine years because we don’t have savings.”

Her jewellery, stored in one of three time-locked safes, is so much more than the value of its precious metal. “I actually have my wedding ring and engagement ring in there at the moment,” she confides. How did that feel? “Really hard. But needs must,” she says haltingly, tears forming. “I know, obviously, we will get them back. But at that time, you just need it.”

The first lesson Finch teaches the employees at his eight branches across London and Kent is how much care they must take over each item that is pawned. He holds up a gold band on his ring finger. “I was midway through my A-levels when my mother committed suicide. This ring here is my great-grandmother’s wedding ring. And before my mother took her life, she took that off and left that on the side so that it didn’t disappear in the mortuary. So I use this ring as an example to my staff about how important it is to look after other people’s property. This is very, very important to me and way beyond its monetary value. We’re not buying pawned items; the ownership stays with the customer.”

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If a possession is unclaimed, it has to be sold for its full market value. A pawner cannot be pursued if there is a deficit, while any profit must be returned. Finch describes the transaction as people “borrowing from themselves. If I borrow that same money on a credit card or a bank loan, that’s the bank’s money. I think, during the current difficult economic crisis, people are arming up with their finances. They’re keeping it all controlled so that they know what they’ve got when things get tough.”

There are almost 900 pawnbrokers in the UK, used by 350,000 people a year. One factor in their buoyancy is the demise of payday lenders, such as Wonga (which filed for administration in 2018), leaving few choices for those wanting to avoid a loan shark. Then there is the closure of high-street bank branches, which Finch claims used to start by finding a reason to refuse a loan anyway, while he does the opposite. No-one asks for your credit history or salary here, just ID. About 90% of customers live in a five-mile radius of the store. It is a local, easy-to-comprehend, on-the-day service, offered face to face — something most would struggle to say about their local Barclays or NatWest.

“I know all the staff by name,” says Barbara, who visits a couple of times a month to see her through until payday. “If you go to a bank, they just ask for too much paperwork. And I’d be so embarrassed because they’ve got a job that pays out a lot more than mine and I just assume that people that work in a bank have got money. Here, you’re not looked down on. I don’t even have to say anything. They just say, ‘Do you want your £50 or do you want your £30?’ It’s a way of life for me at the moment. I class them as my bank.”

The 52-year-old mother-of-two works on a supermarket checkout, where there is only one hot topic of conversation, the rising price of bread, milk — and everything else. She has stopped using her car because of the cost of petrol, and has little faith in politicians helping her out any time soon. “We just live every day as it comes. We don’t wait for anything to be gifted to us because it just doesn’t happen.” As for the chilling predictions of where energy prices will reach next year, Barbara says: “I just hope I still have the jewellery to pawn, so that I can still get by.”

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Peek into Pickwick’s safes, however, and it becomes clear that pawning is not only for those on the breadline. One box contains an 18-carat gold African necklace, bracelet, ring and earring set worth £10,000 (typically, a shop will lend about 70% of an item’s value). There is a Rolex deposited for £4,615 by a builder waiting to be paid for a job. A kickboxer redeems his watch only to show off at a fight, before pledging it again. Finch, who wears a bright blue-faced Rolex himself, has loaned on everything from articulated trucks and a Hovercraft to sculptures and a full set of gold false teeth.

He takes pride in going beyond the legal requirements placed on him — sending texts when the loan is due to expire and printing out pink “Early settlement schedules” that give customers a breakdown of their repayments so they can see the amount they owe for any day within the more than 200 days of the loan period. But he believes the industry is over-regulated — blocking new entrants to the market — and would like to see changes, including a more flexible or even rolling contract.

For many, however, whether these changes take place is a moot point. After all, as Britain braces itself for potentially Hogarthian levels of penury, it is clear pawnbroking is the canary in the goldmine — a symptom rather than a cause. As Lorraine told me: “In the old days, if you had to pawn your jewellery just to get money, you were looked down upon because you weren’t financially stable. Obviously, that’s not the case today — now, half the country is not financially stable.”

*Customer names have been changed to protect identities.

Unfortunately, our present government is less discerning. The whole of Kent has been placed under Tier 3 Covid restrictions — meaning that the end of lockdown barely makes a difference. That’s also true of other parts of the country, but Kent has particular reason to feel aggrieved. Having gone into lockdown as a Tier 1 area, it’s emerged at the other end of the scale.

For some people, this is proof positive that lockdowns don’t work. The real problem, though, is the precise opposite — the surge of infections seen in one corner of the county has not spread to anything like the same extent. Indeed, in some areas there are so few cases that the figures have to be disguised to stop particular individuals from being identified. 

In case you don’t know Kent very well, it’s pretty big — 50 miles plus from one side to the other. It borders London at one end, but is closer to Calais at the other. It’s also home to 1.8 million people. That’s more than four EU member states (or six, if you were to return the London boroughs of Bromley and Bexley to their Kentish homeland).

Kent also contains a whole country’s worth of sociological differences. Picture perfect villages contrast with struggling coastal towns; and built-up suburbs with sparsely populated marshland. And just compare bourgeois Tunbridge Wells, which voted to remain, with Brexity Thanet, which, at one point, had a UKIP-controlled district council. Nigel Farage, born in Farnborough, is a quintessential Kentishman; but then so was Ted Heath, born in Broadstairs. The county is both closely connected to the Continent (literally, thanks to the Channel Tunnel), but also sticks two fingers up to it.

Fierce and gentle, rebellious and conservative, poor and prosperous, the dualities of the county find an echo in the distinction between Kentish Men and Men of Kent. Today, those labels refer to the western and eastern parts of the county; but there was once a class connotation too — the Men of Kent being grander than the mere Kentish Men.

In short, Kent contains multitudes. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the Government from treating the county as an undifferentiated blob. Which is weird, because elsewhere the map of tiers has been drawn in finer detail. For instance, Slough is in Tier 3, but not the rest of Berkshire which is in Tier 2.

So why the geographical blunderbuss in one county and not the other? 

Perhaps it’s because Berkshire doesn’t exist — at least not for administrative purposes. Berkshire County Council was abolished in 1998 and turned into a series of unitary authorities. However, Kent — like most of England — was left largely as it is. With the exception of Medway, Kent County Council remains the highest tier of local government. 

An absurd possibility therefore presents itself — which is that the Covid tiers were assigned by some bureaucrat reading down a list of highest-level local authorities and making no allowance for their greatly varying sizes. But can that really be the explanation? They surely can’t have locked-down nearly two million people just because of a historical quirk of political geography, can they?

It’s hard to tell, because the Government won’t properly explain the rationale for the new tiers. As a result temperatures are rising; mild-mannered MPs like Damian Green, Greg Clark and Tom Tugendhat are on the warpath. And who can blame them? If the ministers can’t justify an apparently nonsensical decision then they deserve all the Kentish pitchforks heading their way.

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At this point, I ought to state that I’m not reflexively anti-lockdown. If there’s a firm scientific basis for any anti-Covid measure, then so be it. I also think we ought to be tolerant of the mistakes that are bound to be made in such extraordinary circumstances. Our leaders are only human after all. However, when a mistake had been identified, it ought to be corrected. Kent MPs have already alerted the government to its geographical illiteracy, pleading with ministers to set tiers by district and borough, not by county. It’s an eminently sensible idea — so why has it been ignored?

As a Kentish Man, I’ve been entertaining doubts — not just about Covid policy or government competence, but also about something of longer-lasting significance: the entire county system. Indeed, I’m coming to the conclusion that this literally medieval arrangement is doing serious harm to the governance of England in the 21st century.

This is a painful realisation. For a cultural conservative like me, county-scepticism isn’t just unorthodox, it’s downright heretical. Our ancient counties aren’t called ancient for nothing — they go back to the early Middle Ages, and some of them to Dark Ages. Kent, for instance, was one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. So why on earth would I want to get rid of that much history? What could be more redolent of a bloodless, bureaucratic mindset than erasing age-old traditions to make way for something more “rational”? I mean, that’s the sort of thing the French would do. Indeed, they have done it — many times. Parisian technocrats are forever tinkering with the internal borders of France.

Ironically, it was the French who gave us the term counties — or comtés — in the first place, replacing the older shires. Originally, a county was a jurisdiction governed by a count — a title derived from a Latin word meaning ‘companion’ (to a king). In England, we replaced the word “count” with “earl” for reasons of delicacy, but “counties” remained.

Over the centuries they took on various administrative functions — and in the Victorian era they became the main engine of local democracy. Except that it’s long been obvious that the county map doesn’t correspond to the geography of the modern world. Urbanisation has disrupted older patterns of settlement; in some cases, county borders that once ran through the back-of-beyond, were enveloped by growing towns and cities. Royal Tunbridge Wells is the classic example: 400 years ago it didn’t exist, but then a spring was a discovered and the famous spa grew up around it, in time becoming bigger than its parent town, Tonbridge. Inconveniently, though, the Kent-Sussex border chopped the new town in half.

Borders can be moved, of course — which is what eventually happened in Tunbridge Wells. However, such tweaks only kick the can down the road. Indeed, road and rail links have changed the old rules of geography, shrinking distances and creating hubs that extend far beyond irrelevant old boundaries. For instance, the Dartford Tunnel means that the two shores of the Thames Estuary have drawn closer together.

Thanks to a shared environment and their mutual proximity to London, they have things in common that don’t apply the rest of their respective counties (Kent and Essex). The same can be said of the Kent-Sussex border. Now that the Weald is no longer an impenetrable wilderness, but a throughly civilised Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, there’s no real distinction between the communities on either side of the invisible line.

In the post-war period, reorganisations of local government tried to catch up with the new realities. Of course, they failed because they were micromanaged from the top-down. Traditional counties like Middlesex and Rutland were abolished and artificial creations like Avon and Humberside imposed on unwilling residents. In any case, the real power stayed in Whitehall.

Subsequent reforms were also bungled. Margaret Thatcher left Greater London and Greater Manchester without effective city-wide government. Tony Blair’s attempt at English regional government was an embarrassing flop. David Cameron and George Osborne made some progress with the City Deals and Metropolitan Mayors, but then they drove their reforms up a dead end. That’s because they tried to impose the same model they used in the cities on other parts of the country and it just didn’t fit. While a city is an organic whole, a non-metropolitan area containing a similar number of people is just too big and incoherent.

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Power must be localised, but only to communities that actually exist — and those are defined by observable everyday experience. Where do people send their kids to school? Where do they go for the big weekly shop? Where to go to church or walk the dog? This is real human geography — the places that people call home and therefore actually care about. Things like travel-to-work-areas may sound coldly functional, but they reflect the rhythms of life. They also define housing markets and hence planning policy — the most important role of a meaningful local democracy. 

In England, devolution is stuck, because our messed-up map of local government has got in the way. In particular, county councils suck decision-making power away from where it ought to be exercised. They are too big to be local, but too small to take on major infrastructure projects currently controlled by Whitehall. And, as we’ve seen with the Kent Covid fiasco, the county system encourages central government to impose one-size-fits-all decisions on places that have little to do with one another.  

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What about identity, though? Don’t counties add to the richness of our national life? Well, yes, up to a point, they do. But not a very significant point — not compared to the other things we identify with. Cross from one home to another, one town to another, one nation to another — and the differences are all-important. Cross a county line, however, and nothing much changes. If it weren’t for the road signs, you probably wouldn’t notice. Even postcodes carry more emotional resonance, in London at least.

I’m not saying that county-based variations in dialect and custom don’t matter. They’ve been much eroded, but let’s hold on to what we can. I love the pageantry of counties too. When I see the flag of Kent — a rearing white horse on a red background — I feel a flutter of pride. Some county flags may be of rather more recent vintage, but ancient traditions are of great value, even if they were invented last Tuesday. 

There’s no reason why we can’t keep the ceremonial counties, with their lords-lieutenant and high sheriffs. In fact, we ought to restore the old boundaries — bringing back long-lost counties like Westmorland. Free of any administrative significance, it would be easily done. 

As with the monarchy, a clear distinction between the efficient and dignified parts of the constitution would allow us to enjoy the symbolism and ritual of the past, without constraining the present. Counties should be like our surviving castles and manor houses — lovely to look at and of zero relevance to contemporary decision-making.

We can keep our heritage, but we don’t have to be governed by it. Especially when it means the difference between being allowed out of our homes or not.

Viewed on a clear day from the chalk cliffs of Ramsgate, the matching white cliffs of France’s Cap Blanc Nez, our isle’s separated geological twin, shimmer on the horizon. In 1940 newsreels, Goering was famously shown peering at a defiant Britain from over there, no doubt picking out the town’s landmarks — the tall church spires that guided ships into harbour, the gaps and folds between the dazzling cliffs — through his binoculars. Heavily bombed in World War Two, and the marshalling point for the Little Ships of the Dunkirk evacuation, Ramsgate and Thanet’s proximity to continental Europe, source of both threat and promise, has shaped the region from the beginning of Britain’s recorded history. Perched on the edge of England, surrounded on three sides by the North Sea, the Isle of Thanet is simultaneously both marginal and central to our island’s story. Wherever it was finished, the first draft of the nation’s history was always written here.

Joined to Ramsgate by the village of Pegwell — a series of flint-walled cottages perched precariously on chalk cliffs concealing tunnels that lead to long-disused smugglers’ caves — sweeps the broad expanse of Pegwell Bay. For thousands of years the bay’s sombre mudflats, quaking bogs and salt marshes, patrolled by long-legged wading birds and basking seals, have served as the first beachhead for migrants and adventurers, missionaries and invaders making their way to this island.

It was here, in 2017, that archaeologists discovered the expeditionary fort built by Julius Caesar in 54 BC to defend his newly-landed legions from the hostile Celtic tribesmen, and here that the legions of Claudius returned in 43 AD, this time to stay. Here, too, were the great oyster beds of Ritupiae, singled out by Roman gourmets like the poet Juvenal for special praise, part of the network of trade and empire linking this lonely shoreline to the great hub of Mediterranean civilisation.

On the other side of the bay, the great flint fort of Richborough, built half a millennium of Roman rule after Caesar splashed ashore, failed to dissuade Saxon raiders from seizing the island for their own.

According to legend, the Jutish brothers Hengist and Horsa, summoned by the Romano-British king Vortigern as mercenaries, first came ashore right here, beginning the process that carved out Saxon England from Celtic Britain. A wooden longship, a gift of the Danish government, commemorates this turning point, its dragon-headed prow looking fiercely out across the North Sea towards its distant homeland.

Under the later Saxon king Ethelbert, Pegwell’s lonely mudflats welcomed more peaceful continental migrants in the guise of St Augustine and his retinue of monks, sent wading ashore here on a mission to civilise the northern barbarians, an effort culminating in the great church of Canterbury and the beginning of England’s 1700-year Christian story. Even today, a fragment of the missionary saint’s bone is still revered in my local church, Pugin’s wondrous neo-Gothic confection of St Augustine’s, a dream in incense-clouded stone of England’s lost High Middle Ages. The England we live in now was birthed on this lonely stretch of low chalk cliffs and brown and squelching shore.

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By Aris Roussinos

Where England ends, Europe begins, a geographic fact that built Ramsgate, the town where I live and write this. Still a modest fishing village wedged in a gap between the chalk cliffs, Ramsgate boomed as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. So many regiments passed through the town, so many warships and troop transports hugged the harbour for shelter, that ranks of Regency villas, handsome in brick and stucco, formed up along the cliffs to house the colonels and admirals, sea captains and majors quartered here.

By the war’s end, Ramsgate had played host to so many eligible officers that, in a fit of “scarlet fever” (named after their red uniforms), the town had become an extension of the London season, with fashionable debutantes and anxious spinsters alike hurrying down in flocks to bathe in the North Sea’s chill green waters and marry well. Ramsgate’s street names — Wellington Crescent, Plains of Waterloo, La Belle Alliance Square — still bear witness to this brief moment of Regency glamour, when hussars and dragoons clip-clopped along the fishing port’s cobblestones to board the ships that would take them to death or glory in the continent’s wars. 

The postwar peace cemented Ramsgate’s status as England’s fashionable resort of choice. Lords Canning and Liverpool strolled the town’s leafy squares discussing the business of government. King George IV and Princess Victoria holidayed here, splashing in the brisk North Sea, and delighting the local burghers with their regal presence. Wilkie Collins summered here, as did Dickens before he settled on the more firmly genteel charms of Broadstairs, just along the coast. Karl Marx, too, would holiday here with his long-suffering family, putting aside his lifetime’s work of global revolution for a week or two to enjoy the minstrel bands on the seafront promenades, dashing off brief notes on Europe’s political convulsions to his fellow revolutionaries while Mrs Marx and the children picnicked on the sands with Engels. 

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Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

Along with kings and revolutionaries, statesmen and writers, the town attracted artists in its heyday. William Powell Friths’s 1854 painting Ramsgate Sands — bought by Queen Victoria to remind herself of her childhood holidays — captures the crowds of mid-Victorian holidaymakers down from London by train, paddling, fully-clothed, in the lapping water, sheltering under umbrellas from the sun in their top hats and hooped skirts. The French painter James Tissot sketched fashionable ladies in crinoline taking tea overlooking the mast-filled harbour, while an impoverished Vincent Van Gogh taught art in a squalid school here for his room and board while admiring the “harbour full of all kinds of ships, closed in by stone jetties running into the sea on which one can walk,” where “further out one sees the sea in its natural state, and that’s beautiful.” Writing to his brother Theo, praising the shafts of light that burst through the black clouds after a squall, Van Gogh observed “this town has something very singular; one notices the sea in everything.” 

Turner, a regular visitor to neighbouring Margate, famously remarked in a similar vein to Ruskin that “the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe,” a quality given to them by the North Sea, which forms the clouds that reflect the dying sun’s most lurid moods. Still the violent drama of their sunsets — the livid reds and golds, oranges and pinks — make the sea and sky seem more real and vivid than the ground you stand on. Indeed, living here feels, at times, more like living out at sea than on land. 

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Sun, sea, sand – and shooting up

By James Bloodworth

All through the year, sudden sea mists drift ashore and blanket the town in white cloud. The lights of fishing boats blink out at sea through the chill fog even as the road in front of you is swallowed by the gloom. In winter, the North Sea winds make the town’s Victorian houses list and creak like wooden ships in high swell, as waves of rain lash against their window glass. Cars and fixtures rust quickly here, wooden doorframes and windows peel and warp in the harsh salt air. The trees along the seafront are bent sideways by the wind; the salt sea air smells sharp, and fresh, like a living thing caught wriggling in a net.

As far back as 1536, the essayist William Camden remarked that Thanet’s locals were “as it were amphibious creatures, and get their living both by sea and land; for they deal in both elements, and are both fishers and ploughmen; for the same hand that holds the plough, steers the ship likewise.” Smugglers and wreckers as well as fishermen, the locals were viewed with some disfavour by the Customs men sent down by Whitehall to disrupt their illicit trade with the continent. “The seamen here are generally reputed excellent sailors, and shew themselves very dextrous and bold in going off to succour ships in distress,” stated an early 19th century visitor, “but they are too apt to pilfer stranded ships, and ruin those who have already suffered so much.”

The sudden winter storms still disgorge many treasures for Thanet’s dog walkers and beachcombers. Every year, cannon balls and human bones, hunks of amber and painted porcelain are washed ashore from the vast ships’ graveyards lying out at sea, onto the treacherous and shifting sandbanks that reveal themselves, like the smuggler’s tunnels in the chalk, only at low tide.

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Hull's irresistible perversity

By Matthew Sweet

A local economy based on smuggling, tourism, fishing and European war has not prospered from the modern era. Like the rest of Thanet, Ramsgate is one of the most deprived areas of the country, sharing little of Southeast England’s wealth. Unemployment is high, life expectancy is low, and better times seem always, like France, barely visible on the horizon. The crumbling Regency and Victorian townhouses, no longer home to scarlet-coated officers or holidaying revolutionaries, have recently attracted another wave of invaders — middle-class London families like my own, priced out of the capital and displacing locals in turn. 

Thanet’s locals and its new army of DFLs — Down From Londoners — still live not-quite integrated lives. Like the rest of Britain, only somewhat more so, in Ramsgate the Somewheres and the Anywheres live jostled side by side. Home, until recently, to the only Ukip-run council in the UK, Thanet’s relationship with the European continent is still an ambiguous thing, and the vote for Brexit here, at 64%, was among the highest in the country.

These tensions find expression in micro-local culture wars, like the battle to re-open the old RAF Manston airfield as a commercial hub. An anti-airport poster in a window here, like an EU flag or BLM placard, is an almost certain signpost of a Londoner-in-exile, as much a marker of gentrification as doors and windows in the sombrest Farrow and Ball shades.

Proximity to the continent is writing Thanet’s history still. An RAF A-400 plane is, as I write, flying back and forth, skimming low above the sea outside my office window, scanning for the migrant boats which are landing in ever-increasing numbers. It is a strange and troubling vision of modern Britain to paddle in the sea with your children while a grey Border Force cutter patrols just offshore, searching for the latest boatloads from the coast of France. Distant past and present still collide here, peace and war, Britain and Europe and the wider world beyond still meshing in strange and unexpected ways as, perhaps, they always have and always will.

Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.

Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.

Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.

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By Niall Gooch

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:

“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”

Another builder of the romantic legends was the author Russell Thorndike. He wrote the Dr Syn series, splendidly preposterous old-fashioned swashbucklers about a mild-mannered Church of England cleric, the Vicar of Dymchurch, who moonlights as The Scarecrow, feared chief of a gang of smugglers. They lead the Revenue a merry dance over the course of seven novels. I was introduced to the books by my father, who is himself a mild-mannered Church of England cleric living on Romney Marsh, but not as far as I am aware a notorious brandy smuggler.

People who have heard of the Marsh are often familiar with its two most famous institutions. Firstly, the Romney breed of sheep, which is now farmed all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, where it makes up more than half of that country’s 40 million-strong flock.

And secondly, the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the 1920s brainchild of millionaire enthusiasts Captain Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, and now a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world. Its fame has spread considerably — there is a Shuzenji Romney Railway in Japan, closely modelled on its English namesake. During the Second World War, a special armoured train ran on the railway’s line, acting as a sort of mobile anti-aircraft unit; it scored only one success, but certainly looked good in propaganda newsreels. Indeed, the entire line was taken over for military purposes, which was hardly surprising given that the enemy lay less than 30 miles away.

The proximity of Europe has been pivotal in the Marsh’s history. Those original continental troublemakers the Romans had a port at Lympne, a village which now lies some distance from the shore following the retreat of the coastline. You will still occasionally hear the chauvinistic local legend that William the Conqueror initially attempted to land near New Romney, but was seen off by the hardy locals, and only then tried his luck further west at Pevensey, where he made his successful landing against the (by implication) soft and irresolute Sussex men. The tale has a kernel of truth: it seems that some of the Bastard’s men did disembark at New Romney by mistake and were rebuffed, but it was a small scale engagement.

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The village that imagined a godless world

By John Gray

Long after the ructions caused by the Normans, the French continued to be a source of unquiet, as well as informal duty-free booze, on the Marsh. From 1800, the coast was heavily fortified against a feared Napoleonic invasion, with the building of the Royal Military Canal at the foot of the surrounding hills to delay any invading French army, and a chain of small gun-emplacements called Martello towers, alongside larger forts at Dungeness and Hythe. Later, the district was expected to be one of the sites for a Nazi invasion; inspection of captured plans after the war confirmed that this had indeed been the enemy’s intention. The field next to my parents’ house contains a concrete bunker dating from this time, presumably intended to defend the road into town from the beach.

Romney Marsh is not nowadays marshland as most people would imagine it. There is no great Grimpen Mire waiting to entrap the incautious traveller, and no squelching bog. For some centuries, most of the Marsh has been grazing pasture. This has not always been the case: well into the second millennium AD, what is now the Marsh was a mix of shallow tidal lagoon and true marshland, with the River Rother snaking through the southern parts.

The lay of the land was radically altered by a series of fierce Channel storms in the second half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the notorious Great Storm of 1287. Old Winchelsea, a substantial place with an estimated population in the thousands, was entirely obliterated and most of the island on which it stood submerged, Atlantis-like, by the surging sea. The modern town of Winchelsea, founded by the survivors of this event, stands on top of a hill: they weren’t taking any chances (although their eventful history wasn’t over — Winchelsea suffered French and Spanish raids during the Hundred Years War and was burned by the French in 1360).

The aftermath of the Great Storm was tough for the place in which I grew up, New Romney. Not only was it severely damaged but, having been a thriving port at the mouth of the Rother, the town’s economic fortunes also declined rapidly after 1287, as the course of the river had shifted well to the south, rendering the harbour useless. Whether the storm itself was directly to blame, as local folk history suggests, or whether the lower Rother and the harbour had become gradually choked with silt and shingle over many decades, and the storm was simply the last straw, the town became something of a backwater.

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By Paul Embery

The fluctuating shape and extent of the Marsh, and changing patterns of land use, have resulted in numerous once thriving communities being abandoned. Within a day’s walk of my parents’ house, there are at least four ruined churches situated far from any modern settlements. One such example is the dramatic All Saints, which served the long-extinct parish of Hope.

Not all these lost communities vanished as suddenly and dramatically as Old Winchelsea. Broomhill, close to Dungeness, gradually became uninhabitable due to the encroachment of the sea in late medieval times. Many villages and hamlets were badly affected by the Black Death or by the malaria which seems to have lingered well into the eighteenth century.

Other relics reflect the more recent past. Close to the trackbed of the partially dismantled Appledore-New Romney branch line, a casualty of the Beeching Terror — the rails remain in place as far as Dungeness, for the sole purpose of transporting spent nuclear fuel — stand three very strange concrete structures. One is a large convex vertical wall, measuring about 200 feet from end to end. The other two resemble giant satellite dishes, set in sturdy stone bases. One is about 30 feet in diameter, the other about 20 feet. They are acoustic mirrors, the legacy of interwar experiments with creating an early-warning system for enemy aircraft crossing the Channel. Similar installations survive at Hythe, and on the cliffs near Dover, but they were never used in anger, having been superseded by radar by the mid-1930s.

The mirrors contribute to the somewhat eerie beauty of the Marsh, with its long unimpeded views and big skies. Perhaps too the precariousness of the Marsh’s existence adds a certain drama and savour to the contemplation of its landscape. After all, most of the land between the Royal Military Canal and the Channel is at or below sea-level: everyone who lives on the Marsh depends on the coastal defences. In the Dr Syn books, Russell Thorndike quotes a fictional though highly apt motto for the Marshfolk: “Serve God, honour the King, but first maintain the Wall.”

It’s hard not to draw lessons for what we might think of as our uniquely modern dilemmas: the inescapability of some kind of entanglement with our European neighbours, however secure we may feel in our island redoubt; the imperative for humility and flexibility in our dealings with the inexorable forces of nature; and the need to accept inevitable change to maintain the broad shape of a way of life.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act. Among other things, Rab Butler’s landmark legislation established universal access to secondary education. In the post-war years, the state system was made up of two unequal parts – the selective grammar schools for children who took and passed the 11 plus exam; and secondary moderns for the majority who didn’t. 1965 marked the start of a new phase – the introduction of comprehensives, which supposedly abolished the great divide.

Of course, that’s to massively over-simplify what really happened. Nothing in the world of UK education is straightforward. After all, this is a country where ‘public schools’ are in fact private. As for comprehensives, their introduction wasn’t comprehensive. There’s always been a degree of devolution in the state system, which is why the grammar schools survived in some parts of the country.

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Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

The biggest pocket of resistance was, and still is, the county of Kent – which is where I grew up. My secondary school was Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, which sounds posh, but wasn’t. In fact, it’s real name (i.e. the one that most people used most of the time) was the unposh-sounding ‘Tech’.

That’s because it didn’t start off as a grammar, but a ‘secondary technical’ or ‘technical high’ school – an all-but-forgotten experiment that exposes one of the great failures of British education policy.

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The old bipartite system of grammars and secondary moderns was originally meant to be a tripartite system.

The grammars, modelled on the public (i.e. private) schools, were there to supply recruits to a broadened-out ruling class, which in the 20th century had become more meritocratic than aristocratic. The secondary moderns were all about schooling the workers, white collar as well as blue – and, ideally, both literate and numerate. To this updated version of the class system was added a third element, one that didn’t really fit in with the old categories of rulers and ruled.

Winston Churchill once said that scientists should be “on tap, but not on top”. He was certainly right that the country needed a lot of them – plus engineers and technologists too. Both commerce and industry would grind to a halt without the advanced application of the arts and sciences, so an army of highly skilled workers was required. But where would this new technical class come from?

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The grammars and the public (private) schools, with their traditional focus on the classics, were not seen as best suited to the purpose. It being the 20th century, scientific and technical subjects weren’t excluded from the curriculum, but their teaching was more a matter of abstract knowledge than applicable know-how. There was also a lingering hint of British intellectual snobbery – a sense that the kind of technical education demanded by the modern world was nevertheless unbefitting of gentlefolk.

Hence the logic of the technical schools – a place for bright kids who wouldn’t mind getting their hands dirty. The tripartite system of post-war secondary education was thus a class hierarchy – with the technical high schools making up the middle layer.

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Well, that was the theory; in practice, the middle layer got squeezed out. Implementation of the 1944 Act was left to local authorities, and provision tended to polarise between the grammars and the secondary moderns. Even before the advent of the comprehensives, the technical schools never accounted for more than 3% of the secondary school population.

Once again, Kent was an outlier. The county made a serious attempt to make the tripartite system work, setting up all three types of school. This is how my school came into being – established in 1956 as Tunbridge Wells Technical High School for Boys (or ‘Tech’ for short). However, by the time I got there, in the early 80s, it had become a grammar in all but name. The subsequent name change was a mere formality.

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It was also symbolic of the erosion of class distinctions – especially those between the traditional and technical professions. The British have long had a tendency to associate the word ‘engineer’ with greasy overalls, but in the post-war years the penny began to drop – we would need more than Oxbridge-educated classicists to prosper in the modern world. With the UK losing ground to the resurgent German, Japanese and French economies, our leaders decided that we had to embrace the “white heat of technology“.

Of course, the way in which the establishment conferred esteem upon the relevant occupations was to drag more and more of them into the academic route of A levels followed by higher education. Thus instead of sending their alumni directly into employment or to technical colleges, the secondary technical schools were increasingly supplying the universities. Amid all that technological white heat, the distinction with the traditional grammars had evaporated.

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In many ways, what I received at Tech was a conventional academic education. And yet the school’s origins set it apart from the older grammar schools. The architecture was post-war plate glass, not Victorian red brick. There was no Latin or Greek, but quite a lot of woodwork and metalwork. There was a school uniform, but no ‘houses’. Corporal punishment was still legal at the time, but seldom used – the theoretical possibility served as sufficient deterrent.

There were prefects, but without much power – and as younger boys we weren’t afraid of them. Bullying, if it happened at all, was almost always verbal, very rarely physical. If it did happen, the thing to do was fight back: the teachers would intervene, but not make a big thing about it. Overall there was about as much order as one could reasonably expect from 800 boys.

Looking back, I can see how Tech pulled off a balancing act – academic rigour without stuffiness, aspiration without pretension, discipline without terror.

Of course, it helped that we were in a prosperous part of the country – one that did well out of the Thatcher revolution. However, we weren’t, most of us, sons of privilege – at least not class privilege.

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Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

As boys tend to do, we’d ask each other what our dads did for a living, and, as far as I can remember, it was jobs like postman, fire fighter, land surveyor, customs officer, sub postmaster. There weren’t many lawyers, doctors or even teachers among our folks.

If we ended up going to university, we were usually the first in our family to do so. And yet there was no particular fuss made about that fact. Nor was there much fuss made about not going to university – a degree was just one among many options to be taken as appropriate (and, it must be said, without loading our young shoulders with student debt). We weren’t burdened with overly pushy parents or teachers either. On the other hand, there was no hostility to academic achievement among the pupils. You could be picked on for many reasons – but not for being a swot.

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In recent years, the grammar schools of Kent have become a political football. Various Right wingers promise to ‘bring back’ grammar schools (to places that don’t have them), while various Left wingers promise to abolish them. For my part, I’ll always be grateful to a school that pushed me when I needed it, but without ever crushing me. The unstuffy grammar school that Tech had become suited me well.

Still, I regret the disappearance of the old technical high schools. Not because setting children on a fixed route aged 11 or 13 was ever the right way forward, but because the techs represented a serious, systematic attempt to cater for the needs of intelligent, but practically-minded, children.

While other countries, notably Germany and Switzerland, have created impressive systems of technical education, Britain lags behind. The academically-minded benefit from the UK’s world-beating universities, but many parts of our country are held back by some of the lowest skill levels in western Europe.

To quote the words that often appeared on my school reports, we “must try harder”.

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By Matthew Goodwin