Photographs of Whitstable (3)

A third tranche of photographs from our visit to Whitstable a couple of weekends ago. All of the buildings in these images exist along the sea wall which was built to protect the town against a recurrence of the 1953 flood event, referred to in the notes which accompanied the first set of photographs. The wall isn't very high, but then it doesn't need to be: this is a flat estuary landscape (created during the last Ice Age, in fact) and when the tide goes out it goes out a ver-r-r-y long-g-g-g way-y-y-y indeed. Ergo, any tidal surge is only a metre or so high.

The first photograph (directly above this text) shows the yacht club, with Judith lounging against the sea wall as she waits for me to take its picture. The second photograph (immediately below) shows a couple of old clapboard houses (and a couple of tourists eating ice cream in the foreground, but we won't mention them); and the third shows one of Whitstable's "lost shipyards", one of the places just behind the beach (and now just behind the sea wall) where the houses were set far enough apart for an inshore fishing lugger to be constructed (although if you zoom in on the name of the old boat now hauled up there you'll see that it's actually registered in Faversham, an inland town further to the west which was an important medieval port until the silting up of the river on which it lies).

Immediately below this caption is the restaurant where we had an early dinner of oysters and, er, oysters before returning to London (as written about in my first post about our visit to Margate and Whitstable). The final photograph shows what may be the oldest pub in the town, built almost on the beach, where the sea wall is thus required to loop around it (because it was of course Much Too Historic to demolish just because the sea invaded the ground floor half a century ago. And quite right too!).