retiredmartin

December 2025. Folkestone. Kent.

Mrs RM is planning a series of posts on the Kent coast, which by her definition starts at Rochester and skips Gillingham on the way to Whitstable. Gravesend will have something to say about that.

“We should go to Folkestone, only an hour.” I said. “You won’t recognise it“.

She didn’t. Ridiculed by Bill Bryson in “Notes From A Small Country“, the holiday trade ebbing way since the invention of cheap flights to Tirana Tenerife, Folkestone has reinvented itself with “culture”.

I hadn’t been since 2021 and a flying visit to the Bouverie Tap, but I was convinced the Creative Quarter and Harbour Arm would impress,

but the first half mile from the station is a succession of the sort of faded guest houses that defined the town at the start of the century.

And then you turn onto Grace Hill, and admire the string of churches,

and the plaques commemorating Hendrix and other legends,

and admire the tiling on the Prince Albert (RIP), and it all makes sense.

“Ooh, that’s nice” says Mrs RM, admiring the Wetherspoons.

“It’s a Wetherspoons“.

She doesn’t quite believe me, so pops in to take a look.

I’d been in the Samuel Peto just before COVID hit,

and somehow missed the grandeur of this former Baptist church,

with rare downstairs loos and an organ which is contractually required to play an extract from a PJ Harvey album annually (rather like the Opera House in Tunbridge Wells has to perform an opera annually).

Somehow, Mrs RM forgot to have a pint of that Batemans Salem Porter she’d loved in Eastbourne last month,

so she didn’t have to visit the Ladies,

and didn’t get the Hymn and Hyrs joke that the Baptists must have spent hours coming up with. Wasted.