REGULAR VISITS

The list of royal visits is long, with the Queen a regular visitor. In 1989 she attended the Kent Show - deciding to return to Windsor by train. Thus a special service was laid on from nearby Bearsted Station to get her back home and not disrupt the busy Friday night commuter service. She visited Brompton Barracks in Medway in 2007, Invicta Barracks in Maidstone in 2011 and bid farewell to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders when they left their long-time home of Howe Barracks in Canterbury in 2013. Margate received a visit from her and the Duke of Edinburgh in November 2011, and in 2015, on a damp and gloomy day, she officially opened The Wing - a tribute to the Battle of Britain at Capel-le-Ferne, near Folkestone. Prince Charles and his wife Camilla made a visit to the Whitstable Oyster Festival 2013, while two years later, a heavily pregnant Duchess of Cambridge toured Margate including the Turner Contemporary.

Prince Harry officially opened the First World War Memorial Arch in Folkestone in 2014.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (who would later become the Queen Mother) toured Folkestone and Dover during 1944 as part of the war effort on one of a number of visits during the conflict.

King Edward VIII may have been a ‘blink and you missed him’ monarch in the 1930s (he abdicated less than a year after taking the throne after triggering a constitutional crisis over his proposed marriage to US divorcee Wallis Simpson), but prior to handing over the crown to his younger brother and becoming the Duke of Windsor, Edward, as the Prince of Wales, had been a regular on the royal circuit. And in 1928, in that capacity, he attended the South East Counties Agricultural Society event held in Tunbridge Wells. The future King was cheered by enormous crowds, all waving their hats, as he toured the site. And no round-up of royalty in Kent would be complete without the obligatory reference to the rich history - and royal patronage - of the county’s many castles. Dover Castle hosted visits by the likes of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, while Leeds Castle was in royal ownership dating back to the 13th century and King Edward. Henry VIII took a particular shine to it and is acknowledged for transforming it into a royal palace.