Featured essays

You’ll need a map because there are no signposts … There are witnesses of course, hundreds of them queueing up to tell you that they are the original Aunt Betsey, or Broadstairs fisherman, or Janet, or how sorry they are now for stealing that pie.

“This bus it was, this ruddy, venerable and, under God’s mercy, immortal bus, that came down the Folkestone hill with unflinching deliberation, and trundled through Sandgate and Hythe, and out into the windy spaces of the Marsh, with Kipps and all his fortunes on its brow. You figure him there.” Kipps.

It isn’t perhaps surprising that Derek Jarman should have fallen in love with Dungeness and Prospect Cottage in particular when happenstance and a desire for fish and chips at the Pilot Inn brought him to Romney Marsh – the ‘fifth continent’ of the Ingoldsby Legends.

Few people generally think of Charles Darwin as a writer, let alone a prolific and gifted writer based in Kent. Although, they may be aware of his Journal and Remarks, generally known as The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), in which a youthful Darwin recounted his five years travelling the world.

It was Kent that engaged my feelings more fiercely than any other place I can remember’, said the American artist Alfred Cohen. He and his second wife Diana lived in Goudhurst, Benenden and Iden Green over a fifteen-year period, and took inspiration from the Kent countryside.

Paul Nash was a war artist and photographer who became an important influence in British inter-war surrealism and Modern Art. Suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after World War One, Nash moved to Dymchurch where he recuperated whilst repeatedly painting seascapes in which the sea wall was a central motif.

English writer Edith Nesbit, who wrote as E. Nesbit, has close links to the coastal county of Kent in South East England. In childhood and adolescence, she spent formative years in the village of Halstead, in the Sevenoaks District of Kent. Several of her best-loved stories for children include descriptions of her childhood home.

Sackville-West is perhaps best known today as a gardener, for her unconventional marriage, and as the inspiration for Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s time travelling, gender fluid, eponymous character. However, she was a prolific and versatile writer in her own right, both a a celebrated poet and author of fourteen novels.