Kent sells itself carefully. The Garden of England, the White Cliffs, the gateway to Europe, the county of orchards, hop gardens, and cathedral spires are an evocative image. The marketing works, with people outside the county rarely imagining anything beyond chalk downs and seaside piers.
Yet for much of the twentieth century, Kent was also coal country. Four collieries in the east employed thousands, transformed sleepy villages into industrial communities, and left political and cultural legacies that still shape the area. The pits have been closed for over thirty years, but the memory of coal is still there if you know where to look.
The Kent Coalfield was discovered by accident. In 1890, engineers drilling exploratory shafts for an early Channel Tunnel scheme near Dover hit coal seams instead. A working pit, the Shakespeare Colliery, briefly followed in the 1890s, but it was the later development of Snowdown in 1908 that began serious mining. Tilmanstone opened in 1909, Chislet in 1919, and Betteshanger, the largest, in 1924. For the next seven decades, east Kent was unexpectedly part of the industrial heart of Britain.
Unlike South Wales, Yorkshire, or Durham, Kent had no tradition of mining. There were no generations of local men ready to descend into the pits. In a story that might be familiar today, the workforce had to be imported. Families arrived from South Wales, the north-east and Scotland, tempted by the promise of jobs and new housing.
In 1926, Pearson and Dorman Long set up Aylesham Tenants Ltd to build a planned village beside Snowdown. The inter-war vision imagined 3,000 homes. The reality saw about 650 were completed before the slump and war halted the plan. Travelling from Canterbury to Aylesham meant stepping into a pocket of mining Britain transplanted into the Kent countryside.
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