From oyster beds to the Crab and Winkle: the story of Whitstable

Oysters were taken from this stretch of the north Kent shore long before the town had a name. Roman writers already knew the coast as a source of good oysters, and the beds offshore have been worked ever since. The name itself comes from a white post, or staple, that probably marked the point where the boundaries of neighbouring estates met. It was certainly the place where the men of the district gathered for open-air courts around the time of the Norman Conquest.

Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, uses the name for a hundred, the unit of local government and policing in those days. The manor was held by the archbishop and recorded a little over forty households, two churches, meadow, woodland and seven salthouses, a sign that boiling salt from seawater mattered here as much as fishing. Its neighbour Seasalter appears as a small borough assigned to supply the archbishop's kitchen, with a church and eight fisheries. Over the following centuries the spelling settled from Whitstaple into the Whitstable written today.

In Elizabethan times the foreshore at Tankerton took on an unusual industry. Copperas, also called green vitriol, was made there in beds and boiling houses; after the first works was founded, five more followed within fifty years, and the trade carried on into the early nineteenth century. The earliest works were lost to the eroding coast, so later ones were built on higher ground.

Oysters remained the real wealth of the place. In 1793 local men bought the rights to the oyster beds, and an Act of Parliament created the Company of Free Fishers and Dredgers of Whitstable to manage them. The Whitstable oyster yawl, a sailing smack refined over generations and built in the town's own shipyards, became the working boat of the bay; at one time eighty or more could be counted out on the water.

On the rise between the town and the slopes to the east, a London businessman, Charles Pearson, and his wife built a Gothic octagonal tower at the end of the eighteenth century. Called Tankerton Tower, it was later wrapped into a castellated mansion and is the core of the building now known as Whitstable Castle.

In 1823 William James proposed a railway from the cathedral city six miles inland down to the coast, and Parliament passed the Act two years later. George Stephenson had taken charge of the works by 1826. The Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, known to generations as the Crab and Winkle line, opened on 3 May 1830: just over six miles of single track, ending at a harbour built for it.

It was a bold mix of old and new. Wagons were moved by horses, by ropes wound by fixed engines on the steepest climbs, and by a locomotive, Invicta, built by Robert Stephenson, which never had the power for the steeper gradients. Under Tyler Hill the builders dug a tunnel now listed at Grade II*, described in its listing as, by a narrow margin, the world's first modern railway tunnel on the first passenger steam railway. The Liverpool and Manchester line opened four months later.

The harbour was completed in 1832 so that coal could pass straight from ships to the railway, making Whitstable the first English harbour with a rail connection. The line carried passengers too, and summer excursions to the beach at Tankerton became a favourite outing. In 1844 the South Eastern Railway took over, relaid the track and ran locomotives over the whole route.

Whitstable also gave the world a new trade. Between 1825 and 1830 the brothers Charles and John Deane developed the first diving helmet, adapted from a smoke helmet Charles had patented in 1823 for rescuing people from fires. By 1836 they had dived on the wreck of the Mary Rose and brought up cannon and timber. Divers from the town went on to salvage work on wrecks and naval ships. One of them, John Gann, put his earnings from a season of diving off Ireland in 1836 into a terrace of cottages known as Dollar Row, and the slightly larger one became the Divers Arms. For more than a century Whitstable divers were famous, until bigger ports took the work after the First World War.

Oysters, meanwhile, reached their peak. In the mid-Victorian years Whitstable supplied around half of the oysters eaten in London. In 1896 the debt-laden dredgers' company was reconstituted under the Companies Act as the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company. The Royal Native Oyster Stores on the beach, a listed building whose main fabric dates from about 1890, still stand beside the slipway where boats were hauled up to them.

Fire and rail reshaped the streets. On the night of 16 November 1869 a blaze that began in a shop near the harbour spread along the sea wall into Marine Street and Harbour Street and destroyed around seventy buildings; the volunteer fire brigade had been formed only two years before. A main-line station opened on 1 August 1860, and the present one replaced it on 1 January 1915 as Whitstable Town & Tankerton. To the east, an estate company set up in 1890 by the owners of the castle began turning Tankerton into a resort, although most of its plots were divided and built on in the 1920s and 1930s.

Around 1884 a boy of about ten, William Somerset Maugham, came to live with his uncle Henry, the vicar of Whitstable, after the death of his parents. He later turned the town into Blackstable, the setting of Of Human Bondage (1915) and Cakes and Ale (1930).

The twentieth century was harder. Passenger trains on the Crab and Winkle line stopped in 1931 and goods traffic ended in 1952; the line reopened briefly to help during the floods of 1953 and then closed for good. Native oyster numbers fell sharply in the first half of the century, and pollution, disease and overfishing had all but ended the old trade by its middle.

The harbour found other work. Bretts opened its first tarmacadam plant there in 1937, and during the Second World War forts were built out at sea to protect the area from air and naval attack; in the mid-1960s some of them became bases for pirate radio stations. After the war the harbour fell into decay until Whitstable Urban District Council bought and repaired it in 1958, and its trade grew again.

The same council had bought Tankerton Tower and its grounds in 1935, and the castle housed its offices until 1973. Among the best-known residents of those decades was the actor Peter Cushing, who spent much of his life in Whitstable, died in 1994 and is remembered in the town museum's collection. In the 1980s a modern oyster festival began, celebrating the industry that built the town, and in 1999 part of the old railway trackbed reopened as the Crab and Winkle Way, a footpath and cycleway.