This Thursday (07-August) marks five years since the seed of moving to the Kent coast was planted. It was during a brief respite of the early lockdowns in summer 2020, when we could at least travel somewhere for a day, so for my birthday we got the train down to Folkestone, and got the bus further down the coast to Dungeness on a blazing hot, sunny day. We cooled off with ice cream and a quick swim in the sea once back in Folkestone, and my wife asked the question of whether I’d ever consider living down there. Well, I’d already lived in Kent before, so it was more a case of whether I’d return: while I was born in Salisbury, and spent the first year of my life in Wood Green, I spent six or seven years of my childhood in the commuter belt of the Medway Towns before my parents split and we moved progressively further north.
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/Subject /Places, Kent
/Playlists 
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/Related /Tuesday Ten/Places/ /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Details /Tracks this week/10 /Tracks on Spotify Playlist/9 /Duration/35:27
It turned out that even just a few months of the COVID lockdowns had already changed my thinking, and I said yes: and eight months later, we’d packed up our much-loved Finsbury Park flat, and moved to Hythe, just a few miles outside of Folkestone. Four-and-a-bit years on, we’ve now bought a house down here, and rather love this corner of the world. And thus, I’m still a Man of Kent (from east of the River Medway), at least in one interpretation of the phrase.
The four-year point since we moved, a few months ago, got me thinking about songs about this part of the world. There is a map shared every now and again on social media that shows the best-selling artists from each county, and Kent is represented by Joss Stone – which is odd, as technically both The Rolling Stones (Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are from Dartford, originally), David Bowie (who grew up in the Bromley area, but his early years were in Brixton) and Kate Bush (born in Bexleyheath) could be said to be from Kent. But really, their careers were made in London and elsewhere. So I was surprised to find that Folkestone became the World’s First Music Town in 2019, and Music in May tries to celebrate the local scene. Needless to say, closure of venues, and pushback against any new ones really isn’t helping the local scene, but it turns out, like most medium-sized towns, there is something of interest going on, with some great local artists and a nascent alternative scene that is gradually finding its feet.
But anyway: I may well come back to local artists in the coming months – I’ve featured a few on /Tuesday Ten posts over the past couple of years as well – but here, I’m looking at Kentish places in song. Not all of it is complementary, that’s for sure, and many of the artists singing are transient visitors to the county, but there are a few here celebrating and highlighting the places that they live and come from. Join me on a tour of parts of my home county.
A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.
Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).
/Soft Play
/Flip ‘Em the Bird
/Heavy Jelly
Let’s open with Tunbridge Wells band Soft Play, who are having trouble on the A21 – the road to Hastings from London, and south-east of Tunbridge Wells (right on the south-western fringe of Kent), a bypass that often has severe congestion. As I know all too well, with it being part of my alternative route to drive to the office if the M20/M25 is screwed up, and the single-lane Lamberhurst bypass section – a planned dual-carriageway upgrade was nixed in the 2010 spending review, and one still desperately needed – being a particular pain.
Soft Play appear to have shared similar experiences to me on that road: annoying gits in Teslas, swearing at other irritating people on the road… Oh yes, driving in the country can occasionally be as frustrating as driving in the city, especially in such a car-loving county as Kent. The countryside provides better views, mind: particularly in the Weald, that A21 passes through. Royal Tunbridge Wells has been a Spa town since the Restoration, and is mostly an affluent commuter town these days, with regular trains to London and an image popularised by letters from “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” in the 1950s as a bastion of “middle England”. Alternatively, Eric Idle & Neil Innes also provide us with the fun of Twenty-Four Hours In Tunbridge Wells, which imagines US sailors with 24 hours “shore-leave” in the town…
/A Cosmic Trail
/The Weald
/The Outer Planes
An instrumental, German prog-metal band might not be the first place I’d turn to find a song titled after one of the most rural and individual corners of south-east England. The Weald actually stretches all the way from eastern Hampshire across to the Kent coast, and the Weald of Kent – part of the High Weald National Landscape – is the rural borderlands across from south-east of Tunbridge Wells, all the way across to the fringes of the Romney Marsh. Once heavily wooded, it is mostly now rolling, hilly countryside, with small towns and villages and not a lot else between. Nowadays, there are castles, vineyards and a whole lot of farmland in the area, and it really is quite a beautiful place to visit. The settlements have been part of the landscape for a long time, too, with small towns like Hawkhurst dating back to Saxon times, and Tenterden is even older.
/Wild Billy Childish and The Singing Loins
/Song of the Medway
/The Fighting Temeraire
Billy Childish is a remarkable artist. Under a variety of names, they have produced countless musical releases since the 1970s, and have also produced various works of art, poetry and novels, too, all by way of a proudly amateur nature, seemingly pursuing for the love of it and for a desire of expression than any desire for wider success. Billy Childish is from Chatham, the one-time naval base and one of the Medway Towns in the North of Kent, a conurbation that gets something of a tough view in British culture – indeed one apparent source of the perjorative term “chav” is as someone from Chatham, although that nowadays seems disputed. This song seems to be a short tale of the naval era of Chatham, when it was one of the most important naval locations in the country – building over 500 ships for the Navy across four centuries.
The dockyard closed in 1984, but had been run-down for a while before that, a victim of modern shipbuilding techniques and the reality that there wasn’t enough space to build the bigger ships the Navy needed. I spent my young childhood (I left when I was about seven or so) living in the outer reaches of the Medway Towns in Parkwood (a suburb of Rainham, in the south-east corner of the region), the other side of the region from the Dockyard, my dad being a commuter into London. It has long been a dormitory region for London commuters, with frequent trains that don’t take too long, and housing prices aren’t too high. I’ve made a few visits back in recent times, with Rochester being an interesting place to visit and explore, and a small industrial/alternative scene has also taken root, with the latest edition of Post Plague in Chatham on this Friday.
/Brutalist Architecture in the Sun
/Medway City 5AM
/ALL IS GREY
One of the artists in that small scene is Brutalist Architecture in the Sun, who’ve been around for a decade or so (and indeed released the excellent Desolation Street a month or so back), and have explored synth-based sounds over that time. One of their earlier songs is Medway City 5AM, a song that seems to owe something to Kraftwerk but with a distinctly British feel. The handful of lyrics make reference to the lonely sky, and lonely concrete: certainly parts of the Medway Towns are bleak, modernist buildings, especially in the commercial centre of Chatham, but move away a little from that centre and the old streets of Rochester in particular give an impressive look at architecture across centuries, as a remarkable amount of it has been preserved.
/Squeeze
/Pulling Mussels (From a Shell)
/Argybargy
I actually had the choice of two songs from Squeeze (the other being B-side and fan favourite Maidstone), which perhaps makes sense when you understand that the band formed in South-East London, so trips out of the smoke for the likes of the young Glenn Tilbrook would have taken him out to Kent. Indeed the anthemic power-pop of Pulling Mussels (From a Shell) was inspired by his childhood holidays to a Leysdown-on-Sea holiday camp, on the Isle of Sheppey.
The Isle of Sheppey is a bit of an isolated place. Sheerness, the port that is on the north-west corner of the island, is a famous old naval town that was developed to guard the Medway, and became an important naval base and freight port. The town has a reputation for being a bit grimy, but a visit there the other year revealed an intriguing, out-of-the-way town that has much to explore, and quite the history (particularly the well-known Bluetown district that sits in the shadow of the dock walls). Much of the rest of the Isle of Sheppey is rural and pretty isolated, and some of it is great birdwatching country.
/Show of Hands
/The Keys of Canterbury
/Arrogance Ignorance and Greed
Modern folk duo Show of Hands are absolutely not from Kent – their origins are in Devon – but they took on an old folk song that features Canterbury some time back. Here, a man woos a woman by offering her a variety of unlikely items (starting with the titular item), but she rebuffs pretty much everything he attempts.
Canterbury is a really old city, and has been inhabited by humans as far back as the Lower Paleolithic. It was the main settlement of the Celtic tribe the Cantiaci, the Romans rebuilt it, the Saxons and the Jutes saw it as an important settlement, and of course the Cathedral (first founded in 597, but rebuilt after William the Conqueror arrived) has enormous importance. As does the King’s School, reckoned to be the oldest continually operating school in the world – founded the same year as the Cathedral. The various attractions in the city makes it a bustling tourist hub, and while it is a relatively small city, it is the primary shopping district too for much of East Kent.
Canterbury also had a notable music scene, the Canterbury Scene, in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mostly progressive rock and psychedelic in sound, notable bands and artists to emerge from it were Soft Machine, Caravan, Robert Wyatt and Steve Hillage, among others. Through Hillage in particular, there are links to ambient music, too, thanks to his work in System 7.
/Chas & Dave
/Margate
/Job Lot
Sadly I’ve used Margate Fhtagn before (twice, in fact – on /Tuesday Ten /203 and /Tuesday Ten /297), so we’re instead taking a daytrip to Margate with Chas & Dave instead, where the duo meet their numbers in their drudging day jobs to be able to afford a coach-trip down the M2 and A299 to Margate, celebrating the trip that a great many working-class Londoners have taken over a great many years, and indeed still do, going on how busy the trains are to the coast in the summer.
Margate has been a port for centuries and a holiday destination since the 1700s, thanks to it’s mostly sheltered sandy beaches and pleasant climate. After the decline that affected many British seaside towns in the 20th Century, thanks to the relative affordability of holidays in Europe, the town has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, with the Turner Contemporary gallery helping to pull in a whole new generation of businesses and artists – and to a point gentrifying the town, which hasn’t always been popular. That said, it’s now a great place for entertainment, food and drink, that’s for sure – and a world away even from the Margate shown in the Chas & Dave video…
/Nadine Shah
/Sad Lads Anonymous
/Filthy Underneath
The exceptional album Filthy Underneath – album of the year on this site last year – deals with a period where her life went to pieces (explained in surprisingly candid detail in this Guardian interview in January 2024). One part of that was moving down to Ramsgate with her then boyfriend (she later married him), and after her substance abuse issues and subsequent divorce, she left Ramsgate fairly quickly. The simmering Sad Lads Anonymous, mostly spoken rather than sung by Shah, is an extraordinary piece, where she shares her disgust of a coastal town that isn’t exactly welcoming to a woman who is of mixed-race heritage.
I don’t mind Ramsgate so much. I’ve been up there to watch Hythe Town win in a playoff semi-final (even if we then lost the final, and two years on, were relegated), but I’m up there more often for gigs at Ramsgate Music Hall, a brilliantly run, small gig venue. Like many coastal towns, it suffers somewhat from the tension between the sometimes overlooked locals and the people that have moved in, mostly from London.
In fact, that kind of tension is something that sums up much of coastal Kent. There’s a lot to like in the county, but there are times when it feels like there is a deep distrust of outsiders, as if hordes of Londoners might sweep away what’s good about the place, and so those that have made the relatively short move from London are known as “DFLs” (Down From Londoners). In fact, many of us want exactly the kind of communities that are already here, and want to be part of it. That said, a pint of DFL, from one of our much-loved local brewers Docker, will do very nicely, thanks.
/Style
/Dover–Calais
/Heaven No. 7
Dover is probably even older than pretty much any other settlement in Kent, it’s position just 21 miles/33 km from mainland France meaning that it has been the point to cross to mainland Europe for a very, very long time. It remains a busy port that since Brexit, has had a habit of snarling up at the smallest problem, with the ripple effect causing Operation Brock on the M20 and various other local traffic issues, too. As for the town itself, well, the town centre is to put it mildly a bit tired, but there are some interesting bars and restaurants if you know where to look, and there is the giant Dover Castle on the cliffs, as well as the Roman Painted House and a preserved Bronze Age boat in the town museum that are well worth a look.
Dover is also the only one of the Cinque Ports to feature this week – our home town of Hythe is the central of the five original Cinque Ports, that were originally given tax and monetary privileges by Edward the Confessor (and added to by later monarchs) in return for providing ships, essentially as a quasi-Navy – although the historians reckon it was actually done to buy-off “troublesome” ports! Either way, the status as Cinque Ports remain, and through the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports at Walmer Castle, retain privileges at Coronations too…
As for this song? A Eurovision wannabe from 1986, where it was entered in the Swedish Melodifestivalen (effectively the Eurovision song selection competition in Sweden) but didn’t make it through to the final. The song was a minor hit, mind, and is about a fictional love story on a ferry from Dover. The reality of the 90 minute crossing is usually rather mundane…
/Athlete
/Dungeness
/Vehicles & Animals
We finish where we started five years ago. Dungeness is as far south-east as you can go in the UK, a vast expanse of shingle, a nuclear power station, two lighthouses and a community of artists and people who can deal with living at what sometimes feels like the end of the world. One of the driest parts of the UK, too – although it isn’t, as some say, a desert – the big skies and views for miles certainly make it feel different to anywhere else, even the adjoining villages. A much-visited place in the summer, going off-season, particularly in the winter, it can be a bleak, lonely place, with the wind and rain whipping across the shingle.
Athlete have taken a trip down there in their 2003 song, noting the lack of basically anything (there is a pub, and a cafe at the Light Railway station – oh, and the seafood shack halfway down the road) other than occasional houses and the detritus of centuries of fishermen and the old, rotting boats left as the shoreline shifted, thanks to the extreme erosion that happens along this coast.
Kent: a county of contrasts – both geographically, biologically and politically, but it’s my home, and I’m still rather fond of it.