From hoppy beer to Charles Dickens, apple pie to buckets and spades, Kent provides some of Londoner’s most happy associations.
Until 1888 many who would now consider themselves Londoners would actually have been citizens of Kent. This was when a swathe of Kent was absorbed into metropolitan London with the formation of the County of London Boroughs : Deptford, Greenwich, Woolwich, and Lewisham.
Kent was and remains London’s principal road and rail route to the continent. It was also a pilgrim route (such as Chaucer’s motley ensemble striking out for Canterbury from Southwark’s Tabard Inn) and a trade route that brought Kentish hops, fruit and other good produce to Londoners. More latterly it became a favourite destination for weekend leisure jaunts and as a commuter fast track to the City. It is also of course the point of arrival for many migrants aiming to cross Kent to reach the promise of London.
Travellers embarking for the continent would often make a Kentish stopover between London and Dover in one of the many coaching inns. Others, set on pleasure and a break from London, would take sailing hoys or steam packets bound for Margate or the other Kentish bathing resorts. More rarefied pleasure seekers and the fashionable of London would journey by coach to Tunbridge Wells for the therapeutic waters and social life flowing there.
Hops are among the goods making a one-way journey from Kent to supply London’s breweries such as the gigantic Anchor Brewery on Bankside. From 1867 Kent hops were assessed, weighed and traded at the Hop Exchange, near London Bridge. And it is still in living memory that many working Londoners would decamp to the Kentish hop fields for a few weeks of bucolic life as pickers in the late summer hop fields – for some their only family excursion to the countryside. Meanwhile Kent apples, cherries and other soft fruits arrived at the London markets either by waggon or else by boat or barge from estuary ports such as Faversham. They continue to arrive, whether in punnets or tin cans.
Kent is ever present in the biography and imaginings of London’s greatest novelist, Charles Dickens. He spent much of his boyhood in or around Rochester, enjoyed family holidays in Broadstairs and for relaxation in his later years headed for Gad’s Hill his mansion at Higham outside Rochester.
Some of the readers of his newly published stories would have been the commuters heading for the City on the trains of the London, Chatham and Dover railway line or South Eastern Railway to deploy their steel- nibbed pens and black ink on the ledgers of Victorian commerce. Flowing into the City from London Bridge Station and later from Blackfriars and Cannon Street, these many citizens of Kent still arrive albeit for different tasks in modern finance or IT. Since the middle of the twentieth century London commuters accounted for a significant part of the Kent residential population, though we do not yet know how this will change.