Whitstable Walking Tour: Salt, Oysters and Steam Trains

Whitstable has spent centuries fighting the sea, feeding London's poor with oysters, and quietly pioneering technologies that changed the world. On this walking tour, you'll trace the town's salty history from medieval salt pans and oyster dredging to smugglers' networks and a flood that nearly swept a pub into the Thames Estuary. You'll also discover how this small Kent town produced two of the 19th century's most important inventions.

The tour starts at Cushing's View on the sea wall, named after actor Peter Cushing, who lived here for 30 years. You'll walk along Island Wall, once lined with boatyards where nearly 300 wooden vessels were built and launched, and pass the preserved oyster dredger Favourite, which worked these waters until a stray German fighter holed her in 1944. Heading through the town's network of 23 alleyways – including the barely navigable Squeeze Gut Alley – you'll reach the harbour, where the world's first steam passenger railway arrived in 1830, inventing the seaside day trip in the process.

From the harbour, the route climbs through the site of a once-thriving copperas industry, where women and children collected iron pyrite nodules from the beach to produce dyes for London's cloth trade. You'll pass Whitstable Castle, built in 1793 by a haberdasher whose son spent the family fortune, and end at the Wynne Ellis Almshouses on Beach Walk.

On this 75-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Hear a first-hand account of the terrifying 1953 flood from the landlady of the Old Neptune pub
• Learn how Whitstable fishermen smuggled French prisoners of war out of rotting prison hulks
• Discover how brothers John and Charles Deane invented the modern diving helmet here in the 1830s
• Explore the harbour where a coal-unloading system called the Jumps kept day labourers from starving
• See the Thames sailing barge Greta, one of the small boats that evacuated troops from Dunkirk in 1940
• Walk Tankerton Slopes, where a failed property developer left behind a half-built seaside resort

Finish with oysters on the seafront or fish and chips eaten on the beach – the most Whitstable ending possible.