Qualla: Shipbourne

Shipbourne: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Roots, CC BY 3.0. Walter Gropius designed a house in Shipbourne in the 1930s and the villagers called it the Chicken House. The Bauhaus founder, the man who had reshaped twentieth-century architecture in Germany before fleeing the Nazis, had built a timber and weather-board home on the edge of the village green for Jack and Frankie Donaldson. It was his last work in the United Kingdom. To Kentish eyes accustomed to oast houses and timber-framed cottages, the modernist lines and unpainted boards looked agricultural in the wrong way - utilitarian, like a coop. The Wood House, as it was properly called, weathered the criticism along with the seasons. It is now a Grade II listed local landmark. The villagers came around.

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Image: M J Roots | CC BY 3.0

Shipbourne: The Ghost in the Crypt

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clem Rutter, Rochester Kent, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir Henry Vane the Younger sleeps in the crypt of St Giles' Church at Shipbourne in an anthropoid lead coffin - shaped to the human form, like the cast of a body. He was buried there in 1662 after his execution for high treason. Vane had governed Massachusetts at the age of twent...

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Image: Clem Rutter, Rochester Kent | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shipbourne: Cazalets and Queens

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Cazalet family followed the Vanes as masters of the Fairlawne Estate, and in 1880 Edward Cazalet rebuilt the village in his image: the Church of St Giles, a new pub called The New Inn (now The Chaser), and several cottages around the green. Major Peter Cazalet became one of t...

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Image: Nigel Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shipbourne: Jane Austen's Father, the Curate

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before George Austen became Rector of Steventon in Hampshire and the father of the most influential English novelist who ever wrote about provincial life, he served as curate of St Giles' Church here until 1758. Jane Austen herself never visited - she was born seventeen years lat...

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Image: Nigel Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shipbourne: The Common, the Cricket, the War

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Shipbourne Common, also called The Green, is the village's central feature: a large, open, dominant space at the heart of everything else. The cricket club was established in 1880, one of Kent's oldest, and originally played on the Common itself. Then came 1939. The Kent War Agri...

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Image: Nigel Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shipbourne: Most Expensive Village in Kent

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poliphilo, CC0. In 2020, KentLive named Shipbourne the most expensive village in Kent. The Metropolitan Green Belt protects the parish from development. Much of it lies within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The central village - pub, church, school, and Common - is a Conserva...

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Image: Poliphilo | CC0