Newnham, Kent

Newnham is a village and civil parish in the Syndale valley in Kent, England, in the administrative borough of Swale near the medieval market town of Faversham.

Newnham has existed as a community of dwellings and work-units for at least 1,000 years. Though it had a lord of the manor and the church of SS Peter and Paul at the beginning of the 12th century, it could be said that nothing of importance ever happened there; yet in it took place centuries of everyday social history and a history of domestic and economic life of generations of English people.

Originally little more than a grouping of farmhouses and farmworkers' cottages clustered around a church and pub, both more than 600 years old, the village featured blacksmiths, a draper, a butcher, a baker and several other shops and pubs by the early 20th century.

Even until the Second World War, most of its inhabitants were born, worked, lived and died in the valley. Many of the men worked on the hop farms, the apple and cherry orchards, or the wood industries that dominated the local economy. The women were domestic servants in some of the larger houses, many set in parklands on surrounding hills (Sharsted Court, Doddington House, Belmont, Champion Court).

Though Newnham has changed enormously over the past 250 years, it retains the feel of an archetypal southern English village, though few farmworkers still live there. Fast railway connections to London and the continent of Europe add to the appeal with jobs in Ashford, Canterbury, Maidstone and Medway within easy reach after the completion of the M20, M2, M26 and M25 between the mid-1960s and early 1990s.

The police house was sold as a private residence in the 1990s, and the post office shut in 1998 while the last shop closed in 2002. A single pub-restaurant remains: opposite the church is the George Inn, which is now no longer mainly a drinking house for locals but instead attracts families and groups of businesspeople for meals. It features 16th-century rafters, inglenook fireplaces, and beer brewed locally (Shepherd Neame at Faversham), and a garden that looks up to the Hilly Field.

Above the field stands the 12th-century manor house, Champion Court, still an apple farm, though employing few people now and an abundance of modern science, overlooking the valley. The other pub-restaurant is much newer but has the air of a barn converted from use on the Syndale vineyard. From its garden there is another striking view across the village past the oast house, now converted from drying hops for beer into a private home. At the location of Syndale Vineyard is also the local brewery, Hopdaemon.

The church's glebe lands, near the centre of the village, provided the space for a post-war housing development. Most of the other houses in the village front onto The Street and include Tudor dwellings, Victorian terraced cottages, and many houses now joined to make larger homes. There is also a collection of infilled recently built houses squeezed into former orchards and fields that abutted The Street and which provided the only late 20th-century development land (which has to be within the "village envelope" according to planning restrictions).