A village drawn for miners: the story of Aylesham and Snowdown

Long before the colliery, this was farming country on the chalk between Canterbury and Dover. Dover Museum notes that people have lived here for thousands of years, with prehistoric remains and Roman farmsteads found in the area, and that the name Aylesham goes back to Saxon times, meaning Aegel's settlement. For centuries the land lay inside the parish of Nonington, and there was no village of Aylesham as we know it.

The places around it are far older than the present village. The church of the Holy Innocents at Adisham dates from around the late 12th century. Goodnestone Park was built in 1704 by Brook Bridges, and Jane Austen stayed there regularly in the early years of her brother's marriage to the baronet's granddaughter, Elizabeth. At Barham, Broome Park, a Grade I listed house of the 17th century, became the home of Field Marshal Kitchener for the last years of his life.

The railway arrived early. The line from Canterbury reached Dover Town on 22 July 1861, and Adisham station opened the same day. For more than sixty years its trains ran through open fields where Aylesham now stands; there was nothing there yet to stop for.

The change began at the coast. In 1890, borings at Shakespeare Cliff near Dover, made during early work on a Channel Tunnel, struck coal, and over the next few decades companies sank shafts across east Kent in search of a new coalfield. Of the many pits started, only four were ever properly developed. Snowdown, sunk in a field of the Holt Street estate near Nonington, was one of them.

It was hard won. While the first shaft was being sunk, water burst in at about 260 feet and 22 men drowned; that shaft was abandoned. A second shaft succeeded, and on 19 November 1912 the first coal was raised from a depth of 1,370 feet. Snowdown had become the first commercial pit in Kent.

The miners needed a way to reach the pit and somewhere to live. A halt for Snowdown and Nonington opened on the Dover line in 1914. Arthur Burr, managing director of Kent Coal Concessions, wanted his workforce close to the mine, and in the early 1920s a small triangular estate was built for them at Woolage Village; around sixty of those homes still stand.

The early years were unsteady. A strike in 1921 drove the owners into receivership and the colliery closed the following year, although the pumps were kept running so that the workings would not flood.

In 1924 the firm of Pearson & Dorman Long bought Snowdown and modernised it, replacing the steam winder with an electric one. A deep pit needed a settled workforce, and the company bought land for a new village, sited between Snowdown and a pit planned at Adisham that was never sunk. The idea, according to Dover Museum, was to house the men of more than one colliery together so that the community would be more varied.

The plan was drawn by the town planner Patrick Abercrombie, later Sir Patrick, working with J. Archibald and C. T. F. Martindale. Their layout of 1926–27 was formal and symmetrical, set around a central grassy square; the Kent Historic Environment Record describes it as designed to echo the shape of a pit-head winding frame. Abercrombie drew on the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, and most of the houses were semi-detached pairs or short terraces with gardens, with space set aside for churches, schools and a community centre.

Building started in 1926. Families arrived from every coalfield in the country, many from South Wales, Scotland and the North East, and the village quickly gathered its institutions: a Baptist church in 1927, the Church of St Peter in 1928, the first Catholic church in 1929, and in the same year the Snowdown colliery brass band and male voice choir. On 1 July 1928 the Southern Railway opened Aylesham station to carry the new traffic.

The town on the drawing board was never finished. Within a few years the depression between the wars brought building to a halt. About 650 homes were built for mining families, far fewer than planned, and the grand boulevard was never completed east of the market place.

Snowdown was the deepest colliery in Kent, its shafts going down more than 3,000 feet, and it was also the hottest and most humid. Dover Museum records that many men worked naked at the coalface, that heatstroke was frequent, and that a miner could drink around 24 pints of water in an eight-hour shift. They had their own name for the place: Dante's Inferno.

The work cost lives. In 2017 a memorial garden was opened at the Aylesham Heritage Centre with a pair of black granite plaques; one carries the names of the 57 men and boys who died in accidents at Snowdown between 1907 and 1965.

The war reached the village too: Aylesham's first Catholic church was bombed in 1941 and restored in 1948. A couple of years before the coal industry was nationalised in 1947, Snowdown employed more than 1,800 men. The Coal Board kept investing, and between 1952 and 1956 it built a new winder house for the No. 2 shaft using the Koepe system of winding. That building and the older fan house beside it were listed at Grade II in 2007 and still stand over the site.

A few miles east, another survivor of the coalfield still runs. The East Kent Light Railway, one of Colonel H. F. Stephens's cheaply built lines, was laid from Shepherdswell to carry coal from Tilmanstone colliery, with a permanent line in place by June 1912 and passenger trains from 1916 until 1948. Coal traffic ended in 1986, and heritage trains now run between Shepherdswell and Eythorne.

Aylesham became a parish in its own right in 1951, separated from Nonington. A new Catholic church, St Finbarr's, followed in 1957, a prefabricated building bought to replace the smaller one of 1929. In the 1960s the parish council campaigned for an industrial estate so that the village would not depend on coal alone, and won.

That mattered when the industry ended. During the national miners' strike of 1984–85, Kay Sutcliffe, the wife of a striking Aylesham miner, wrote the poem 'Coal Not Dole'; set to music, it was later recorded by several folk singers. One of the Kent pits was the last in the country to return to work after the strike.

Coal production at Snowdown stopped in 1986, the colliery closed in 1987 and its shafts were capped the following year. In 1989 the last pit in Kent closed as well. Aylesham lost the employer it had been built for, and in time its secondary school, and it needed years of regeneration. The memory of the pit is kept by the volunteers of the Aylesham Heritage Centre, which looks after the village's mining history.

In the 21st century Abercrombie's unfinished village began to grow again. The 2011 census counted 3,999 people in the parish. In November 2012 Dover District Council permitted an expansion of up to 1,210 homes, increased to 1,360 in 2020, and by 31 March 2025, 1,217 of them had been built. The council now calls the whole scheme Aylesham Garden Village, and in 2025 it was considering an outline application for a further 800 homes with space for jobs and community facilities.

The older village is still easy to read on the ground: the formal avenues around the square, the station opened for the miners in 1928, and the winder house at Snowdown standing over the capped shafts.