Gladys Waterer shaped early twentieth-century Dickens performance culture in Broadstairs through festival adaptations and leadership in the Dickens Fellowship. Her novels The Third Chance and The Lady in Mauve weave Margate, Ramsgate, and Broadstairs into coastal fiction that observes local amateur theatre politics and everyday seaside life.

Ian Fleming’s Kent life shaped the settings, mood, and moral contrasts of the early James Bond novels. Golf courses at Sandwich Bay, coastal cliffs around Dover and St Margaret’s Bay, and inland villages near Canterbury become both real anchors and imaginative stages for Cold War anxieties in Moonraker and Goldfinger.

Haley Smith introduces 19th Century visitor experience the popular Kent town of Gravesend.

William Dyce’s 1858 Ramsgate holiday and the painting Pegwell Bay link family leisure, seaside commerce, and a fleeting celestial event in Donati’s Comet. Close attention to tiny pictorial details places the artist and his relatives within Victorian resort culture while critics praised the work for poetic meaning drawn from ordinary modern life.

Richard Dadd’s early life in Chatham and Rochester links precocious artistic brilliance with the onset of mania after an 1842–43 tour, culminating in the 1843 killing of his father at Cobham. The flight through Dover, the 1844 trial, and confinement at Bethlem and Broadmoor frame how Victorian law and psychiatry redirected punishment into institutional care while his paintings transformed personal delusion into enduring cultural influence.

Using original diary entries Ivana Nika traces the journey of Anne Walker and Anne Lister through Kent en route for the continent in 1834.

All Saints parish church at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey reveals late medieval and early modern tensions between parish identity and preferred burial at Minster’s SS Mary and Sexburga. Wills from c.1460–1559 show Eastchurch parishioners, including the Cheney network, directing burials and major devotional bequests toward Minster while leaving Eastchurch mainly funds for lights, vestments, and fabric repairs.

Paul Nash’s Dymchurch paintings turn the sea wall into a modern monument that stages an elemental struggle between sea and land while replaying the trauma of the First World War. Biographical detail, visual analysis, and later reinterpretations connect his increasingly abstract and surreal coastal imagery to ideas of defense, memory, and the fragile permanence of reclaimed shorelines under climate change.

Dr Ruth Heholt introduces Kent born and raised author Catherine Crowe whose eclectic work has been linked with spirits and smugglers.

Alice and Michelle trace Kent connections in the life and work of poet, author and critic, Edmund Blunden.

Brogdale Farm near Faversham preserves the National Fruit Collections as a living archive of more than 4,000 fruit varieties and their genetic diversity. Tudor-era orchard building, twentieth-century supermarket standardisation, and modern scientific curation explain why grafted heritage cultivars matter for food security, research, and cultural memory.

Prof. Linden West discusses the 'important, complex and contested' 100 year history (1890 - 1989) of the Kent mines and miners.