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I met Ann Widdecombe several times and I always considered it a great privilege.

For many years, when I was running the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, she spearheaded opposition to everything we did. We ran clinics to provide abortion, which she believed to be fundamentally wrong - even before she joined the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, we debated and discussed, with each of us accepting the other was entitled to hold our views and to express them. She was feisty, uncompromising and principled - also polite and engaging. I believe we found each other’s views to be interesting, if challenging. In her heart she may have believed I was on the road to Hell but in the here and now I was just someone of a different persuasion.

That was about more than 20 years ago, when people seemed much more tolerant of ideological differences than they are now. We used to talk about political opponents as “frenemies” - friends off the camera, enemies in front of it.

It wasn’t dishonest. We never dropped our principal beliefs; rather, we understood that it was quite possible to disagree with someone about something and yet agree with that very same person about something else. Looking at social media posts, and even newspaper commentaries, sometimes it’s hard to believe now that open discussion can still exist and that people of different backgrounds can still come together, focused on something they believe is important, disregarding their differences.

One of the reasons I love volunteering in the Fleur Bookshop is because, in this respect, it is absolutely countercultural. Here discussion thrives. It’s a hub for regulars who pop in for a chat and visitors who pop in to look at books and settle into a discussion that could be about anything. Volunteers, drawn by a love of books, or the company of those who love books, have views and opinions that are as different as they could possibly be.

Yet no one considers that politics should be out of bounds between book sales. Instead, opposing views are aired good-naturedly and opinions accepted in good faith.

The book donations (and sales) reflect the variety of our townsfolk who donated them. Books celebrating Britain’s colonial past sit alongside books condemning it. It is as intellectually diverse as it is possible to be - with, arguably, an over-representation of interest in trains, buses and military battles.

The Faversham Society itself has an old-fashioned, pluralist feel - in the best of ways. As a non-political civic organisation open to all who support our aims and purposes and who want to see our town grow and develop while maintaining its heritage, we should be able to rise above the sectarian, tribal concerns of directly political institutions.

What unites us in the society is simply a love of our town and a desire to grow our future out of the best of our heritage. There’s a joy and a genuine strength in being able to accept differences, put them aside and focus upon what binds us. That’s what we do: it’s good for the Faversham Society and it’s good for the town.

We’re sure you’ve heard about the exciting archaeological discovery at Lynsted - a copper-alloy die stamp from the sixth or seventh century.

It is an example of one used to make decorative metal foils for high-status military helmets. It is the only one of its kind yet found in Britain and is very similar in size and design to panels on the helmet found in the Sutton Hoo excavations in Suffolk in 1938-39.

Dr Andrew Richardson, the finds liaison officer for Kent County Council, said the “extraordinary” discovery opened up the possibility that the Sutton Hoo helmet was manufactured nearby, possibly in Faversham, an important centre of elite metalworking in early medieval Britain.

The helmet, one of Britain’s greatest archaeological treasures, had until now been thought a masterpiece of Swedish craftsmanship that was buried about 1,400 years ago, alongside a king in Suffolk.

But now, Dr Richardson says: “For the first time, there is really no reason for saying the Sutton Hoo helmet couldn’t have been made in the British Isles,” he said.

He will be giving a talk on the find at the Old Brewery Store, Faversham, at 7.30pm on Wednesday, 5 August.

Doors will be open from 6.30pm, allowing you time to enjoy a drink before you take your seat. Tickets must be prebooked, either via our website or at the Visitor Information Centre. Tickets are free for Faversham Society members and £5 for non-members.

Here’s a view from the Arthur Percival collection showing the Brents Tavern after the area had been cleared the 1950s and before the nearby estate was developed. It shut as a pub in 2021.

The Fleur de Lis Museum is open additionally on Tuesdays for the school holidays, starting on 21 July. There is always lots to do for children, including our new Time Travel exhibition.

Admission is free and we are open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and the first Sunday of the month, from 11am to 3pm.

Don’t forget, Chart Mills is also open on Saturday afternoons from 2pm to 4pm, except the first Saturday of the month. Instead, you can join an explosive walking tour down to Chart Mills on the first Sunday.

For more information and to book, visit the address at the foot of this page.

This summer is the time to get the best value from your Faversham Society membership! For anyone unable to join one of our Saturday morning guided town walks because of other commitments, or who has done one recently and so considers it “done”, we have the very thing.

We have a series of summer evening strolls lined up for you between now and the end of season. Each one will be on a different theme so will have a unique route and itinerary, from better-known to lesser-known aspects of Faversham history.

So join us once, twice, or several more times, knowing that you’ll see and learn something different each occasion. Best of all, each takes place on a weekday early evening — and we hope there’s a day and time slot to suit everyone. And, of course, there are still two more opportunities to join one of our gunpowder walks on Sunday afternoons.

For all details, head over to the Faversham Society Events page on the link below. You can reserve your place either there or in person at the Visitor Information Centre at 12 Market Place. We look forward to welcoming you soon.

Favershamsociety.org/events

The Open Gardens event was a huge success again this year. Thankfully it cooled off a bit and garden enthusiasts were out in force, more than 1,200 of them!

A total of more than £10,000 was raised, to be shared between National Garden Scheme healthcare charities and the Abbey Physic Garden.

Our thanks go to those of our members who generously opened their gardens on the day. The Arden’s House Garden attracted 900-plus visitors, and the Fleur de Lis Museum Georgian Garden was busy all day too.

Thanks also go to all the volunteers who helped with the organisation. If you’re keen to get involved next year and take part in one of the most popular events in the Faversham calendar, please email the organising committee at the address below.

Favershamopengardens@gmail.com

The most surprising marginalia in our collection is Puritan with a black capotain hat, with band but no buckle, goatee beard, scalloped collar and heeled shoes in Universalis Historiae Profanae Medulla

Among the historic collections now housed at Faversham Town Council’s offices at 12 Market Place is the Doddington Parochial Library. Last year, a small group looked for inscriptions in the books, to find out more about the previous owners and readers.

The library was established in 1744 from about 350 books from the collection of Daniel Somerscales, vicar of Doddington from 1694 until his death in 1737. At that time, as today, people would often sign their name in the books that they owned. About a third of the volumes in this library have this kind of inscription. Somerscales’s signature is in nine. His copy of Homer’s Iliad (Geneva, 1609) is signed by both Daniel and his father “Johannes Somerscales … suis libri” marking it as “his book”. Much later in life, Daniel inscribed Osterwald, Arguments … Old Testament (1716) with a shaky “DS, 1733”.

Somerscales had the interests of a scholarly parish clergyman of his time which included moral reformation and pastoral work. As well as theological works there are a significant number of books on how to live a good life such as Fleetwood’s The Relative Duties of Parents and Children (1705) and James Kirkwood’s The True Interest of Families or, Directions How Parents may be Happy in their Children, and Children in their Parents (1690).

The late 17th and early 18th century were a time when more children were learning to read, girls as well as boys, and when religious readings were given at home. Some of the books contain traces of the time children spent with them, whether in the vicarage or before, we do not know.

The most surprising marginalia we found is a drawing of a man dressed in Puritan-style clothing on the rear endpaper of the small but thick, leather-bound book Universalis Historiae Profanae Medulla (The Essence of Universal Secular History) by Pareus, 1631. The full-length figure has a black capotain hat, with band but no buckle, goatee beard, scalloped collar and heeled shoes possibly with buckles. There is a second hat on a profiled head to the right and more portraits on the pastedowns (the outer half of the endpaper), by the same person.

Upside-down underneath the drawing is the name “Henricus” and a comment that appears to read “Ioannus Sleidanus assinus est” or “Johann Sleidanus is an ass”. Sleidanus was a European historian, an annalist, or chronicler, of the Reformation. The volume bears witness to the thoughts of probably more than one distracted or exasperated history student. The blank parts of books were sometimes used for practice letters or unrelated drawings called marginalia, but these are extraordinary. The careful detail shows that the outfit has caught his attention, maybe it was how he wanted to dress or perhaps it was a drawing of a particular man that he had seen.

A Latin copy in the library of Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion, published in Geneva in 1606, is signed by William, John, Samuel and Julian Jemot/Jemmat in an unusual position on the binding thongs, in very small, neat handwriting. Three of these were brothers from a family of Church of England clergymen from Reading. Samuel was rector of Eastling, Faversham in 1629-36.

In 1643 William was appointed by parliament to lecture on the Puritan message in the neighbourhood of Faversham. He was also rector of Nettlestead 1643-47 then returned to Reading in 1648 when his brother John, who was vicar there, died. William Jemmat’s printed works include A Watch-word for Kent and may serve for admonition to Essex suffolke, and other counties which doe enjoy the Gospell, and their estates in quietnesse. Exhorting Gods people to stir up themselves out of security, and prepare for an heavy judgement that may be coming upon them: being sermon-notes delivered at Feversham in the county of Kent (1643).

We found out that William was in Faversham preaching the Puritan message, had owned the Calvin book and that it was in Doddington Vicarage by 1750. The Jemmatt name traces back several centuries in Faversham and there may have been other connections, it seems likely that the book remained in the area, in some house or another. The book with the fashion drawing in was published in 1631, William Jemmat visited to preach in 1643, when the clothing and the ideas were new.

Hasted in his survey of Kent of 1782 described Doddington Vicarage as a “neat, modern sashed house”. Somerscales had renovated it in 1731. His will does not mention the library but Henry Shove, the next vicar, signed the inventory compiled by Somerscales’s executor, Samuel Lisle, Archdeacon of Canterbury in 1743 confirming that the books were in the vicarage. The library remained there in cupboards of similar date until it was relocated in 1980.

Many of the books in the library are by 17th-century English religious authors. There are writings of church fathers and classical works in English, in Latin and in Greek and books on controversies of the day such as whether it was right to baptise adults.

Theological issues were evidently of high interest to a community of scholarly clergy; some are annotated with passion. Less expected are the family connections revealed in the inscriptions and the insight they give us into the intellectual life of families, of literacy and ideas passed on along with the volumes. Doddington Parochial Library still has more stories to tell.

The library can be viewed by appointment by contacting the address below.

Favershamcharters.org/doddington-library

I am a semi-retired architect and I moved to Faversham about five years ago after having spent most of the past 50-plus years working in the Global South. Housing did not form a significant part of my work there but before going to southern Africa in 1970, I had worked for two firms of architects who had specialised in the design of housing and this together with my continuing interest in house design, has given me a basis, I think, on which to judge the type of developments that we are seeing going up around Faversham and other towns in the country.

I have been decidedly unimpressed by the abysmally low standard of design generally of the housing developments being built around the town and this view has been reinforced by my recently having become a member of the Faversham Society planning committee, which is responsible for reviewing planning applications for developments around the town.

The applications for housing developments we have been seeing are pretty terrible in that the designs in all are generic with no real connection to the architecture of the town; there is usually little sense of “place” within the developments, the layouts being dominated by roads, parking and hardstanding; there is no meaningful landscaping structure within the sites; the only public open spaces are usually around the perimeter of the sites; little or no consideration has been to orientation of the dwellings and their exposure to the sun and there are overlooking and privacy issues.

To take the example of Duchy of Cornwall’s Southeast Faversham development, it appears to have tried to capture the randomness of a settlement such as Faversham through the use of traditional models seemingly without recognising that such settlements have taken centuries to develop. Trying to produce an imitation within a short period of time will inevitably result in an unconvincing pastiche of the real thing. There seems no good reason to do this as the site is not near the town centre and therefore any housing does not have to “fit in” to its surroundings. The development also suffers from most of the problems outlined in the previous paragraph.

Then there is the issue of the detached house. Developers seem to think that the large, detached house in low-density estates is the optimum form of development even if the houses are only separated by a metre or less. These developments, besides having most, if not all, of the problems outlined above, are extremely wasteful of land (and most are taking place on valuable agricultural land) and, as they are also taking place without any consideration being given to public transport links, they are adding greatly to the transport problems around the town and to greenhouse gas emissions from private cars.

That it could be done differently can be seen by examining some mid-20th century developments by architects such as Eric Lyons (around southeast London and at New Ash Green), Phippen Randall and Parkes (in Harlow and Crawley) and Austin Vernon (in Dulwich). Most of these developments, for both social housing and middle-class private housing, utilised terraced housing at higher densities than are being seen around Faversham now. Although these developments are now 50 years old or more, most are still looking good because of their thoughtful design, good-quality construction and the landscaping. Although they are mainly terraced houses, they are still very desirable as can be seen from the high prices that they command. The developers operating around Faversham seem, however, to be uninterested in, or ignorant of, any alternatives to what they are building now.

But enough of these aesthetic and planning considerations! There is now a much greater problem facing housing developments of any kind, even if developers seem to be in total denial about it and this is, of course, climate change. Climate change is still being thought of in terms of incremental change but what we are seeing is the arrival of a completely different chapter in our climate history (illustrated by the extreme temperatures experienced this summer).

The Climate Change Committee was established in 2008 to advise UK governments on reducing carbon emissions and adapting to the impact of climate change. The committee’s recent report states that the UK can now be regarded as a hot country with heatwaves that are expected to exceed 40C by 2050. Periods of extreme heat are likely to become the “new normal” and about nine in 10 of current UK homes are likely to overheat, leading to an additional 10,000 heat-related deaths or more a year. The UK’s present infrastructure is built for a climate that no longer exists and urgent changes are required if we are to survive global heating.

So how should this affect housing design given that new houses today should, if properly built last for 30, 40, 50 years, or longer? We should be designing and building houses now that will be able to cope with the rapidly changing climate and the expected rise in temperatures. Developers are, however, still building houses using 19th or 20th-century models (or in the case of the duchy, an 18th-century model) that were designed to cope with a climate that has disappeared or is rapidly disappearing.

One solution would be to use air-conditioning but this is very energy-intensive and even now accounts for about 4% of global greenhouse emissions a figure that will undoubtably grow unless other solutions can be found. More efficient modern systems can use heat pumps but the use of air-conditioning, however, powered is likely to increase inequality between those who can afford it and those who cannot. There are other ways to control the heat that depend upon the use of passive measures.

When I lived in West Africa (where the annual temperature range was 28-35C with high humidity levels and heavy rain), I built a house for our family that did not depend upon air-conditioning. It was designed on two storeys with the main living and sleeping accommodation on the first floor to catch the breeze. The house faced north-south to reduce the amount of sun penetration on the front and rear elevations and it had very large roof overhangs to keep the sun (and rain) off the walls and windows. The house had a wide frontage and was only one room deep so that all rooms could get the maximum cross-ventilation.

The roofs were well insulated and the first-floor ceilings were high to maximise volume. There was no air-conditioning in any of the rooms but the house was very comfortable and we lived there quite happily for five years.

I am not saying that this could be a model for housing in UK but the use of similar passive measures could be used to reduce internal temperatures and improve comfort levels. Heat pumps and solar panels will obviously play their part but the use of passive measures such as large roof overhangs to protect first-floor windows and walls and projecting canopies or other shading measures to project ground-floor walls and windows from the summer sun (but allowing in the winter sun) would, if not obviate completely the need for cooling systems, at least reduce the load on any such system.

Houses facing north-south would reduce solar penetration and wide frontage designs would allow for more cross-ventilation and lower temperatures within the houses. Heavily insulated roofs and triple-glazed windows would also reduce internal temperatures. Wide verandas would mediate between outside and inside and planting and landscaping around the houses and reductions in hard surfacing would also help.

The house that we bought when we moved to Faversham is a small, very narrow, terraced house that is 160 years old and required complete renovation. I did my best to make the house comfortable in hot (and cold) weather by insulating the roof and front and rear walls; installing double-glazed windows; opening up the ground floor so that there can be a breeze through the house (there are no internal doors on the ground floor), providing the rear extension with large openable windows on two walls to provide cross-ventilation and by constructing a pergola over the terrace outside the extension to protect the rear wall and windows from the sun in the afternoon.

There are some developments that give reason for hope such as the Phoenix development in Lewes and in some of the housing developments in and around Cambridge but they are few and far between and most do not go far enough in the use of passive methods to counteract high temperatures. It seems that the duchy is considering selling 20% of its land holdings and rumour has it that this might include their land outside Faversham. If that happens then we might get a developer prepared to improve the designs.

If you would like to have a chat, I am in the Fleur bookshop in Preston Street on Saturday mornings.