Description

Note from the author......

It was way back in 2017 that I was asked to write a short pamphlet visitors could use if they were interested in finding out more about Victorian Faversham.  This would join other free pamphlets visitors can pick up from the Visitor Information Centre and easily carry round with them if they wished to go on  a history walk, a gunpowder walk or a west to east walk.  It took about two years to write this paper, and I regret to say I failed miserably to do what I was asked, because it proved impossible to condense Victorian  Faversham down sufficiently.

I then made it worse by deciding that anyone visiting the town and using the trail would need to know non-Victorian detail they were passing on the walks, so used italics to include those as well.  So in the end it was 37 pages long.

It is divided into three walks starting from what is now the Faversham Society’s bookshop in Preston Street, which at that time housed the Visitor Information Centre.  (That has now moved to the Town Hall in the Market Place.)  The walks are of different lengths and you can choose whichever one suits you.  The walks are completely separate so there is some necessary repetition, and of course you can choose to jump from one to the other as you wish.

Victorian Faversham is a fascinating subject, particularly after the railway arrived in 1850.  You can read in the introduction an article written by Arthur Percival, our eminent local historian, and one of the founder members of the Faversham Society, in which he imagined writing a tourist guide to the town for visitors in the year 1897.  Later on in the paper you can  find out what he was doing with a tape measure in the Parish Church and what he was trying to prove.