Walking With Writers

Join us on a literary journey around the Kent coast to see how it has inspired writers over the centuries

- Caroline Millar

With a 350-mile coastline, part estuary, part sea, Kent has long attracted artists drawn to its qualities of light and water; what painter JMW Turner called ‘the loveliest skies in Europe’. But what about the written word? Has the coast inspired writers to put pen to paper?

From Gravesend to Dungeness we’ll journey around the coast to find out about some of the books and writers who have drawn inspiration from our watery county.

It’s not an exhaustive list (it misses out some of the big names, like Joseph Conrad and Ian Fleming) but a taster of writers and writing that have captured, in some way, what makes this coast unique.

THE HOO PENINSULA

We begin on the Hoo Peninsula. One night in May 1732, a group of five friends (including the artist William Hogarth) met in a London pub to begin their Five Days’ Peregrination (1872) by boat and on foot around the North Kent coast. Part lads outing, part parody of the ‘Grand Tour’ (in which well-off young men toured cities like Venice to be edified by art and culture), their trip included breakfast in Gravesend, hopscotch outside Rochester town hall, dung flinging at Upnor and a ‘comfort break’ in the graveyard at Hoo St Werburgh.

Guided more by their stomachs than the sights, with descriptions of food and drink featuring heavily, the Crown Inn at the end of Rochester High Street fortified them with: “A dish of soles and flounders with crab sauce, a calf’s heart stuffed and roasted, the liver fried and the other appurtenances minced, a leg of mutton roasted and some green peas.”

ROCHESTER