Characterful seaside town built on rich harvest from the sea
Renowned for its oysters, characterful Whitstable has thrived from industries linked to the North Kent shoreline
As the sea mists of autumn build and roil along the North Kent coast, a seaside town prepares for an age-old harvest. At this time of year, the Whitstable native oyster, the delicate rounded mollusc that has made the area famous since Roman times, is in season. The oyster is best eaten when the letter ‘r’ returns to the months of the calendar, so from September onwards, the five-year-old natives are brought up from their offshore beds to the town’s small but busy harbour. Although inexorably linked to the sea, there is more to Whitstable than oysters. It once played a major part in England’s textile and printing industries as a producer of copperas, used as a dye mordant and to make high quality ink. It also helped advance diving as a result of its salvaging expertise. Just two miles to the east, the community of Seasalter has a history of extracting salt, and the coast is rich with stories of smuggling.
Food of emperors
Oysters thrive here, thanks to the brackish conditions created by water from the North Sea and Thames Estuary mixing with coastal streams and salt marshes. It provides abundant phytoplankton for oysters to feed on, while the gently shelving, hard London clay of the seabed provides a perfect habitat. To the Romans, oysters were a delicacy. They would dredge for them as their vessels passed the Kent coastline, the soldiers and sailors onboard consuming oysters on the move. They even took them back to Rome. There are records of emperors enjoying oysters at the heart of the empire. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the plentiful molluscs had become a staple food for even the poorest families. With meat too expensive, oysters were a cheap source of protein.
However, the Whitstable oyster trade has had changeable fortunes over the years. The native industry virtually collapsed after the Second World War, due to overfishing combined with other factors, including disease and a series of hard, cold winters. Today, due to the mix of the introduced Pacific, or Portuguese, oyster species, Crassostrea gigas, which can be gathered all year round, alongside the smaller native oyster, Ostrea edulis, business is thriving once more.
Roads from the sea
The sea not only provides the town’s most notable harvest, it has also defined every aspect of its life for centuries, including the layout. “When you walk along the High Street, you will notice that it’s wiggly, which is unusual,” says Peter Banbury, a trustee of Whitstable Museum and Gallery. “It’s wiggly for good reason: it used to be the coast. Go back to the 14th century, and on the north side of the High Street, you would have been in either water or salt marsh.” Today, there is at least a quarter mile of built-up land, and the clues to where it comes from are in the names of three streets that run parallel to it: Sea Wall, Middle Wall and Island Wall. Each of these roads was once an actual sea wall, built in a bid to convert the marshy shoreline into usable land for boat building and fishing access. The first walls were built between Seasalter and Whitstable from 1325 to 1340. Middle Wall, as it is now known, followed in 1583. In 1779 came Sea Wall, with