Discover Whitstable

A working oyster town on the Thames Estuary

Whitstable sits on the north Kent coast where the River Swale meets the wider Thames Estuary, about 8km north of Canterbury and a few kilometres west of Herne Bay. The Domesday Book recorded it in 1086 as Witenestaple, and the town's identity has been tied to oyster harvesting for far longer than that; native oyster beds here were worked in Roman times, and by the 1850s Whitstable was said to be sending as many as 80 million oysters a year to London's Billingsgate Market. The harbour itself, designed by the railway engineer Robert Stephenson, opened in 1832, four years after the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway began running the world's first regularly scheduled steam-hauled passenger and freight service between the two towns, a line still remembered locally as the Crab and Winkle line.

The town's five wards, Tankerton, Seasalter, Chestfield, Swalecliffe and Gorrell, wrap a compact centre that most visitors cover on foot: the harbour and its fish stalls, the High Street and Harbour Street's independent shops, and the seafront path east toward Tankerton Slopes, where the grass banks look out over The Street, a shingle spit that surfaces at low tide and disappears at high water. Novelist W. Somerset Maugham spent part of his childhood here, and actor Peter Cushing lived and is buried in the town; more recently it has become known, not always comfortably for longtime residents, as a weekend and second-home destination for Londoners, an arrival locals shorthand as DFL, Down From London.