However the sand got into Sandwich, it did Deal a big favour. As the Cinque Port’s harbour silted up from about 1500, the merchant ships out in the downs, protected by those hidden shallows from the Channel’s full fury, began to offload their cargo into small boats called hoys that came out from Deal. A new town was the result, expanding until about 1860, by which time bigger ships had forced trade away and the Royal Navy depot was closed. Although there was a flurry in the 1920s, when they started to mine coal at Betteshanger, nothing much has happened since, with the result that what is left is as if pickled.
The beach front, Middle Street and the High Street and the small streets and alleys that run between them are a kind of zoo of domestic architectural and decorative styles, with houses grand and not so grand from about 1600 onwards. It has great charm now, having survived somehow the twin 1960s terrors of property developers and planners.
The earlier prosperity brought its problems, though: drunkenness, theft, fighting and smuggling. In 1704 Daniel Defoe expressed the wish that ‘the barbarous hated name of Deal shou’d die, Or be a term of infamy; And till that’s done, the town will stand, A just reproach to all the land.’ But Deal proudly remains a town for naughty people, for people who do not want to be told how to behave or what to like. It is not posh — the novelist and chronicler of establishment misbehaviour Simon Raven was exiled here by his publisher as a punishment — but it maintains links with the capital’s haut bohème, with a handful of actors, writers, painters and even the odd pop star living here.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in