Industry in East Kent: Coal, Cement, Pharmaceuticals and the Ports

East Kent is filed under agriculture. Hops, orchards, the Garden of England: the description is not wrong and it is badly incomplete. For most of the twentieth century this corner of the county was a coalfield, and for most of the second half of it the largest single employer within reach of Thanet was a pharmaceutical research campus at Sandwich.

Both are gone. What replaced them is the subject of most local economic argument, and neither the mining history nor the science history is widely known outside the area.

The Kent coalfield

Coal was found in east Kent almost by accident, during exploratory boring for a Channel tunnel scheme in the 1890s. The seams turned out to be deep, hot, wet and difficult, and the field that developed was small by national standards and expensive to work.

Four collieries dominated it: Betteshanger, Chislet, Snowdown and Tilmanstone. They sat in a triangle of countryside between Canterbury, Deal and Dover, within a short distance of the isle, and they created something east Kent had never had, which was an industrial working class with no local roots.

That last point matters more than the tonnage. The Kent pits could not recruit locally in sufficient numbers, so miners came from Wales, the north east, Scotland, Yorkshire and Durham, many of them blacklisted after earlier disputes elsewhere. Purpose-built mining villages went up in agricultural parishes to house them. The result was a set of communities culturally quite distinct from the countryside around them, and a coalfield with a reputation for militancy that its size did not otherwise explain.

The pits and the strike

The Kent field was already in decline by the 1970s. Chislet closed in 1969, Snowdown and Tilmanstone in the 1980s, and Betteshanger, the last, in 1989.

The 1984 to 1985 strike was the defining episode. Kent miners were among the most solidly committed in the country, and Kent pickets travelled to coalfields across England, at times in the face of police roadblocks on the county’s own roads. The strike’s collapse and the closures that followed removed the industry within five years.

What was left is visible if you know where to look. The former colliery villages remain, with housing stock and street layouts that make no sense as agricultural settlements. Betteshanger’s spoil ground has been landscaped into a country park. The pit head gear is gone.

Cement, brickmaking and the chalk

The chalk that made the Ramsgate tunnels cheap to dig also carried a cement and lime industry, and brickearth deposits supported brickmaking across the county.

Cement manufacture in Kent concentrated further west along the Thames, at a scale that dwarfed anything on the isle, but chalk extraction, lime burning and brickmaking were widespread and small-scale locally. Most of it has left no visible plant. What it left is holes: chalk pits and brickfields, many now filled, built over, or turned into nature reserves, and occasionally discovered by somebody digging foundations.

Brewing and agriculture

The agricultural description of Kent is accurate as far as it goes. Hops, fruit and cereals dominated the countryside, and the hop harvest brought tens of thousands of Londoners into the county every September for a working holiday that lasted, as a mass phenomenon, into the 1960s.

Brewing followed the hops. Shepherd Neame at Faversham has been brewing since the seventeenth century and describes itself as Britain’s oldest brewer, which makes it one of the very few east Kent industrial businesses to have survived continuously from the pre-industrial period to the present.

On Thanet itself the agriculture was different again. The chalk and the light soils suited market gardening and arable rather than orchards, and the isle supplied vegetables to London through the same railway that brought the holidaymakers down.

The pharmaceutical campus at Sandwich

In the 1950s an American pharmaceutical company established a research and manufacturing site at Sandwich, and over the following decades it grew into one of the largest pharmaceutical research operations in Europe.

The science done there was substantial and internationally significant, including compounds that became very widely used drugs. At its height the site employed thousands, drew researchers from around the world into a small Kentish town, and supported a supply chain across east Kent.

In 2011 the company announced it was closing the site as a research centre, with the loss of around two and a half thousand jobs. For an area with the employment profile east Kent had, that was the single largest economic event since the pits.

The site did not close entirely. Part of the operation remained, and the wider campus was redeveloped as Discovery Park, an enterprise zone housing a mix of independent science and technology businesses. That transition preserved a science cluster where there might have been an empty campus, and it did not replace the employment one for one.

Ports and the sea

Ramsgate, Dover, Folkestone and Whitstable all worked as ports, and the sea provided fishing, boatbuilding, pilotage, salvage and, in one form or another, smuggling.

Ramsgate’s harbour was built as a refuge, prompted by the Goodwin Sands, and became a fishing and later a cross-Channel port. Boatbuilding was a substantial local trade into the twentieth century. The town’s small boats went to Dunkirk in 1940, which is the part of the maritime history everybody knows.

Passenger and freight ferry services from Ramsgate ended in stages, with the last substantial freight operator collapsing in 2013. Fishing continues at a much reduced scale. Offshore wind has brought a new marine services requirement to the harbour, which is currently the most active industrial use of it.

Aviation

Manston, on the isle, was a military airfield from the First World War, an RAF station through the Second, and later a civil airport with an unusually long runway. It closed to aviation in 2014.

The site’s industrial significance was never mainly about passenger flights, which were sporadic. It was the runway, the maintenance capacity and the freight potential, and the argument about whether those still have value is the largest unresolved economic question on the isle.

Fishing, and what is left of it

Ramsgate’s fishing fleet was substantial into the twentieth century and is small now. The decline has four or five causes that operated together rather than one that can be blamed: falling stocks, quota allocation that favoured larger vessels, the cost of compliance and safety equipment on small boats, and the disappearance of the local infrastructure that supported a fleet, from ice to net repair to buyers on the quay.

What survives is inshore rather than distant-water: day boats working close to the coast, landing mixed catch, selling into a market that is mostly export or wholesale rather than local. A boat can land a species that no local restaurant buys and that must therefore be trucked, which is where much of the margin goes.

The Goodwin Sands remain the defining feature of the fishing ground and of the harbour’s existence. They have wrecked ships for as long as ships have passed here, and the refuge harbour was built because of them.

Wartime industry

Both wars turned east Kent from an economy into a front line, and the industrial consequences outlasted the fighting.

Ramsgate and Margate were shelled and bombed in the First World War and heavily bombed in the Second, the beaches were mined and wired, and the holiday trade that the towns lived on ceased entirely for years at a time. Manston operated as a front-line fighter station through the Battle of Britain, close enough to the coast to be attacked repeatedly.

The small-boat evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 drew on the harbour and its people directly, and it is the single most widely known episode in the isle’s history.

Recovery afterwards was slower than the national pattern, partly because the physical damage was concentrated in exactly the seafront property the visitor economy depended on.

The Goodwin Sands are also, periodically, a planning controversy in their own right. Proposals to dredge aggregate from them have drawn objection on grounds ranging from wreck protection and war graves to the effect on the coast behind, and the argument recurs whenever a scheme is proposed.

What the pattern shows

Three things recur across all of it.

East Kent’s industries were nearly all extractive or transitive: taking something out of the ground, or moving something across the water. Very little was manufacturing in the midland sense, and that made the local economy unusually exposed when the resource or the route lost its value.

Each collapse was compressed. The pits went inside a decade, the ferry traffic inside a few years, the research campus in a single announcement. There was no long tapering that allowed a workforce to move gradually into something else.

And the replacements have been smaller and differently skilled. Discovery Park employs people, and it does not employ two and a half thousand. Offshore wind uses the harbour, and it uses fewer people than the ferries did. That gap is the economic story of the area, and it is the reason local argument about any large site is as heated as it is.

Salvage and pilotage were trades in their own right because of those sands. Ramsgate’s boatmen made a living from wrecks, and the line between rescue and salvage was a commercial as well as a moral one.

Frequently asked questions

Was there really a coalfield in Kent?

Yes. Four collieries worked deep seams in east Kent from the early twentieth century until 1989, when Betteshanger, the last, closed.

Why were Kent miners known for militancy?

The field could not recruit enough local labour, so it drew miners from established coalfields elsewhere, including men blacklisted after earlier disputes. The resulting communities had strong union traditions imported from outside the county.

What happened to the pharmaceutical site at Sandwich?

Research operations were largely closed in 2011 with the loss of around two and a half thousand jobs. Part of the operation remained and the wider campus became Discovery Park, hosting independent science and technology companies.

Is anything still made in east Kent?

Yes, though at a smaller scale and in different sectors: science and technology at Sandwich, brewing at Faversham, marine services at Ramsgate, and agriculture and food production across the countryside.

Can the mining history be seen anywhere?

In the former colliery villages, whose housing and layout make no sense as agricultural settlements, and at Betteshanger, where the spoil ground has been landscaped into a country park.