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A notice outside a cottage at Kemsing says 'Kemsing is beautiful. Keep it tidy'. The plea seems to be effective for it is, on the whole, a very tidy village as well as being a very charming one.
It is centred round St Edith's Well, which is surrounded by a little walled lawn behind the village war memorial, where the spring bubbles up to feed a tiny stream. This is St Edith's Well. St Edith, who was the daughter of King Edgar (the peaceful) and his Lady Wulfrith, was born in Kemsing in AD 961, although she lived most of her life in the Abbey of Wilton in Wiltshire. She was only twenty-four when she died and became venerated as a miracle worker to whom a shrine was built at Kemsing which prospered from the resultant visits of pilgrims.
There is a statue of the saint, surmounted by a clock and a bell, on the front of the most eye-catching building in the village, St Edith's Village Hall, which was given to the village in 1911. The 21st century village straggles a bit in all directions, but the area around the well, which includes the Post Office, the two inns - The Bell and The Wheatsheaf - that eye each other covetously across the road, and a few attractive old houses, is as charming as any old village in Kent.
As well as being the birthplace of the 10th century saintly princess Edith, Kemsing is also noted as the birthplace of Women's Institutes in Kent. The county's first Institute was founded here in December 1915 and, now joined by hundreds more all over Kent, the mother of them is still going strong.
Kemsley is of no great age at all having been built as a 'model' village on the marshes around Sittingbourne for employees of the local paper mill. Still today, the Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railway runs steam train excursions along the line linking the town with the village, which is dominated by the sprawling UK paper mill and consists mainly of regimented estate development.
The village itself is centred around the square which, with its social centre, was intended by the original builders in the mid-1920s to fulfil the role of the traditional 'Big House' in older villages. The Kemsley Arms public house and its neighbouring, rather grandly-named, Kemsley Concert Hall exhibit none of the characteristics of traditional village features at all.
Kent likes to boast that it has more buildings listed as of historical and/or architectural interest than anywhere else in Britain out side London. But what, it is often asked, will be today's bequest that successive centuries will similarly prize? Well, one development that may very well become a cherished example of late 20th century planning is the Kings Hill community on the site of the former West Malling airfield, which was one of those that featured in the Battle of Britain during WW2.
For years after the war no-one was quite sure what to do with the old airfield. The Ministry of Defence wanted to sell it but the Air Ministry wanted it to be used for civil flying. Local people opposed such use, protesting that the noise of aircraft landing and taking off from the runway would be unacceptably intrusive. Various ideas were suggested but in the end Kent County Council, having failed to enlist the collaboration of local borough councils, took the plunge and bought the entire airfield in 1973.
The council then brought in American developers who formed a new company, Rouse Kent, to develop a showpiece business village. It was to be complete with three on-site 'village' housing developments of 1,500 homes in all, with a school for the children living there.
Today, the development is still going on, and there are already more houses than was originally intended. It has now become an independent parish in its own right and some fear that it will spread to engulf neighbouring West Malling, Mereworth and Wateringbury which would then lose their separate identities.
Nevertheless, the low density, low-rise business premises which house the headquarters of several nationally - indeed, internationally - known companies, part of the University of Greenwich, and offices of both Kent County Council and the Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, all snuggle into sympathetically landscaped surroundings completely different from anything else anywhere in Kent.
The entrance to the village - for such it really is, however different from any other village in Kent - is off the A228 and is marked by a fairly dramatic piece of sculpture that is actually a series of blocks of shaped stone set one on top of the other to make a lofty column. The brick paved roads leading to the various parts of the site curve gently through a tamed rural landscape of grass and shrubs. A central lawned roundabout features one of the most distinctive examples of outdoor art in Kent: three sculpted figures all pushing, from different directions, a huge polished metal ball.
The sculpture stands in front of the gateway leading to the golf club and some of the more up-market housing. The whole impression is one of tended parkland which, while very different from the rural setting of most of the county's long-established villages, still suggests a very pleasant environment in which to live and work.