Newnham, Kent
Encyclopedia
Newnham is a village in the Syndale valley in Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, in the administrative borough of Swale
Swale
Swale is a local government district with borough status in Kent, England. Its council is based in Sittingbourne. The borough is named after the narrow channel called The Swale, a channel that separates the mainland of Kent from the Isle of Sheppey, and which occupies the central part of the...

 near the medieval market town of Faversham
Faversham
Faversham is a market town and civil parish in the Swale borough of Kent, England. The parish of Faversham grew up around an ancient sea port on Faversham Creek and was the birthplace of the explosives industry in England.-History:...

.

History

Newnham has existed as a community of dwellings and work-units for at least 1,000 years. Though it had a lord of the manor and the church of SS Peter and Paul at the beginning of the 12th century, it could be said that nothing of importance ever happened there; yet in it took place centuries of everyday social history and a history of domestic and economic life of generations of English people.

Originally little more than a grouping of farmhouses and farmworkers’ cottages clustered around a church and pub, both more than 600 years old, the village featured blacksmiths, a draper, a butcher, a baker and several other shops and pubs by the early 20th century.

Even until the Second World War, most of its inhabitants were born, worked, lived and died in the valley. Many of the men worked on the hop farms, the apple and cherry orchards, or the wood industries that dominated the local economy. The women performed domestic service in some of the big houses, many set in parklands on surrounding hills (Sharsted Court
Sharsted Court
Sharsted Court is a manor house set in woodland near the village of Newnham, Kent England. A house or lodge has been recorded at the site since the time of Odo de Bayeux in 1080, however the present building, exhibiting a number of later styles, principally dates from the 18th century...

, Doddington House, Belmont, Champion Court).

A modern village life

Though Newnham has changed enormously over the past 250 years, it retains the feel of an archetypal southern English village, though few farmworkers still live there. Fast railway connections to London and the continent of Europe add to the appeal with jobs in Ashford, Canterbury, Maidstone and Medway within easy reach after the completion of the M20, M2, M26 and M25 between the mid-1960s and early 1990s.

The police house was sold as a private residence in the 1990s, and the post office shut in 1998 while the last shop closed in 2002. Two pub-restaurants remain: opposite the church is the George Inn, which is now no longer mainly a drinking house for locals but instead attracts families and groups of businesspeople for meals. It features 16th-century rafters, inglenook fireplaces, and beer brewed locally (Shepherd Neame
Shepherd Neame
Shepherd Neame is an English regional brewery founded in 1698 by Richard Marsh in Faversham, Kent. It is a family owned brewery that produces a range of cask ales and filtered beers. Production is around 230,000 barrels a year...

 at Faversham), and a garden that looks up to the hilly field.

Above the field stands the 12th-century manor house, Champion Court, still an apple farm, though employing few people now and an abundance of modern science, overlooking the valley. The other pub-restaurant is much newer but has the air of a barn converted from use on the Syndale vineyard. From its garden there is another striking view across the village past the oast house, now converted from drying hops for beer into a private home. At the location of Syndale Vinyard is also the local brewery, Hopdaemon.

The church’s glebe
Glebe
Glebe Glebe Glebe (also known as Church furlong or parson's closes is an area of land within a manor and parish used to support a parish priest.-Medieval origins:...

 lands, near the centre of the village, provided the space for a post-war housing development. Most of the other houses in the village front onto The Street and include Tudor dwellings, Victorian terraced cottages, and many houses now joined to make larger homes. There is also a collection of infilled recently-built houses squeezed into former orchards and fields that abutted The Street and which provided the only late 20th-century development land (which has to be within the “village envelope
Urban growth boundary
An urban growth boundary, or UGB, is a regional boundary, set in an attempt to control urban sprawl by mandating that the area inside the boundary be used for higher density urban development and the area outside be used for lower density development.An urban growth boundary circumscribes an...

” according to planning restrictions).

Architectural points

Much of the village is a conservation area
Conservation area
A conservation areas is a tract of land that has been awarded protected status in order to ensure that natural features, cultural heritage or biota are safeguarded...

 and several buildings are individually listed while the village is within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is an area of countryside considered to have significant landscape value in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, that has been specially designated by the Countryside Agency on behalf of the United Kingdom government; the Countryside Council for Wales on...

 (Kent Downs AONB
Kent Downs AONB
Kent Downs is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Kent, England . They are the eastern half of the North Downs and stretch from the London/Surrey borders to the White Cliffs of Dover...

). Building in the open countryside is tightly restricted, whereas “rural pursuits”, horse-riding and walking are encouraged.

A notable listed house is Calico House, built in the early 17th century. Another sizable house was the 19th-century vicarage, no longer used as such. It was built in 1860 by the incumbent needs naming who also rebuilt the crumbling church, largely at his own expense. The tiny Congregationalist chapel also stands, disused, as a reminder that the Church of England and the squirearchy did encounter some resistance to their rule.

The valley road was a highway in Norman times, linking the Roman Watling Street
Watling Street
Watling Street is the name given to an ancient trackway in England and Wales that was first used by the Britons mainly between the modern cities of Canterbury and St Albans. The Romans later paved the route, part of which is identified on the Antonine Itinerary as Iter III: "Item a Londinio ad...

 (Dover and Canterbury to London, the A2) to the Pilgrims' Way
Pilgrims' Way
The Pilgrims' Way is the historic route supposed to have been taken by pilgrims from Winchester in Hampshire, England, to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in Kent...

 on the other side of the downs. However it was almost impassable in winter and Newnham was substantially self-sufficient until the 19th century. Indeed the shops that residents whose closure the older villagers bemoan probably did not begin till the 1840 when passing tradesmen and deliveries made it possible to open a draper’s and grocery shop. A 2010 excavation established that a full-scale Roman road passed along the valley though its precise route remains to be confirmed; it has been explored only near the Watling Street (A2) Syndale junction and at the foot of Newnham's "hilly field".

The farmhouses in the village, including the old Parsonage Farm whose farmhouse now stands in only half an acre next to the church in The Street, yielded most of their farmlands to provide space to accommodate incomers in the past 30 years. There is now considerable turnover in population.

Church, school and amenities

The church of SS Peter and Paul now shares a vicar with half a dozen other parishes. The village no longer has a school of its own (indeed it lost it as early as 1877 when the board school opened in Doddington
Doddington, Kent
Doddington is an affluent rural English village, in the south eastern county of Kent, within the borough of Swale. A picturesque village nestling in the 'Syndale Valley' which is in the Kent Downs and is designated an Area of outstanding natural beauty...

, the only other village in the valley. Doddington lost its primary school too in 2008).

Nearby Doddington still has a butcher’s shop and that successor of the village blacksmith, a garage and petrol station, as well as its pub and church. It also has a hostel for walkers to complement the bed and breakfast
Bed and breakfast
A bed and breakfast is a small lodging establishment that offers overnight accommodation and breakfast, but usually does not offer other meals. Since the 1980s, the meaning of the term has also extended to include accommodations that are also known as "self-catering" establishments...

 accommodation it offers to visitors to the area.

Both villages, about two miles (2 km) apart, have a village hall, now used for keep-fit classes and the occasional auction or flower show. They share a war memorial to those killed in two world wars. Neither village in the valley has street lights or mains drainage as there is little demand for such. Broadband internet access, mobile phone connection and satellite television signals matter as much to many current villagers, especially to home-workers and children, as the mains water and gas supplies.

The valley is chalky downland and is atop a plentiful aquifer
Aquifer
An aquifer is a wet underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials from which groundwater can be usefully extracted using a water well. The study of water flow in aquifers and the characterization of aquifers is called hydrogeology...

 which provides water to the growing nearby urban communities. The pumping station in the valley stands beside a unique 1937 experimental building, recently bought and undergoing conversion to residential use. The building was designed to soften the hard lime-scaling water which it pumps from the ground. The water softening plant was built for the Kent Water Board and is one of few remaining if not the last of its kind. The Twentieth Century Society proposed the concrete structures for listing citing their “tremendous sculptural qualities” and Grade II listing was granted in November 2006. As such, it joined a range of older and more traditional buildings, including several thatched houses.

The population of Newnham numbered 24 householders in 1569. In the first national census in 1801, there were 262 residents reaching what may have been a peak of 451 in 88 houses in 1841 just before out-migration began in earnest. In 1931, there were 258 people in 92 homes and there are now about 350 people in 145 houses.

External links

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