Introduction: Kent’s Gateway

By Dylan Potter

Our story and our journey, starts in the county closest to Europe with just twenty miles separating the coasts of Kent and France. It is across this channel, before the sea flooded in after the last ice age, that tribes first migrated to the south of the British Isles from Belgium and northern Europe. Those seas that separated the ‘Britons’ from the rest of the continent were the routes by which the Romans later invaded twice within one century, over 2000 years ago.

It is this massive migration of the Italian people, which brought what we call ‘civilisation’ to Britain. The Romans , with their architecture, literature, politics, roads, art, merchants, slaves and mercenaries from across the known world, were the people who first built and named our nation: Britannia. A nation shaped, later on, by waves of invaders; Germans (Saxons), Danes and Norwegians (Vikings), French (Normans) and, even later, by population migrations from across the whole world.

As we start our travels through England, we follow the Roman roads from Dover to Canterbury to London, and the Pilgrim’s Way from Canterbury to London; routes which are still etched upon the Kentish landscape and which we still follow in our cars and trains today.

We also follow the air-routes flown by the first airplanes in Europe. We track them up to London from Sheppey or back across the English Channel. We also pay homage to great journeys to and from Kent, especially those of Joseph Banks the great botanist and founder of Kew Gardens. We follow his journey as he accompanies Captain Cook on his ‘discoveries’ of Australia and New Zealand. We also write of the exiled Romanoffs, relatives of the murdered Tsar, as they flee Russia for sanctuary in Faversham. We end the section with the story of one Zimbabwean girl, the latest in a long line of peoples from around the world who have made their new home in this country.

So embark with us upon stage one of our great journey as the Romans land in Deal, one misty morning so, so long ago…