It’s Christmas, which means that lots of people from small towns and villages across the country will be heading home to the places that their city friends forget exist. Trading the lively lights of London – it’s usually London – for the countryside, seaside or whatever other sort of sticks, the pilgrimage back to where you’re from is usually a mixed bag. It’s a weird balancing act between the warmth of nostalgia and the reminders of why you left.
For me, that comes on the Isle of Thanet, which comprises the seaside towns of Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs, as well as several smaller villages, and is Kent’s most easterly point. It was formerly separated from the main land by the 600m-wide Wantsum Channel, but over the course of the last millennium the channel became filled up with sediment from the River Stour and the shingle that was collected along its coast helped to attach Thanet to the rest of England. The name, though, has stuck.
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