Forest, kilns and a campus on the ridge: the story of Blean

Long before anyone planned a college here, the high ground north of Canterbury was forest. Blean grew as a scatter of houses along the road from the city towards the coast, in the middle of the Forest of Blean, and much of the parish is woodland to this day, a good part of it ancient. In the reign of Henry VI, boar were hunted in Blean Woods for sport.

People settled early. Beside the parish church, Kent's Historic Environment Record describes the earthworks of a medieval settlement, a manor house and two dwellings set in three adjoining enclosures, lying partly on the site of an earlier Roman building. Written records, Domesday among them, show it existed by the 11th century; the pottery found there suggests it had been abandoned by the early 15th.

The church that outlived it is dedicated to a pair of saints rarely found in England, the twins Cosmus and Damian. It is first mentioned in the 11th-century Domesday Monachorum, and the building that stands today dates mainly from the 13th century. The parish carried the saints' names for centuries: it was officially St Cosmus and St Damian in the Blean until 1 April 2019, when it became simply Blean.

The woods saw darker days too. Bartholomew de Badlesmere, a baron who had turned against Edward II, was captured after the rebels' defeat at Boroughbridge in 1322, tried at Canterbury on 14 April that year, and dragged to Blean, where he owned property, to be hanged and beheaded.

On the neighbouring ridge, the hamlet of Tyler Hill carries its old trade in its name: the first part comes from an Old French word for a tiler. London clay lay underfoot and the surrounding woods supplied fuel, and from at least the 12th century until the 19th the slopes between the hamlet and Canterbury were dotted with kilns.

Historic England's description of the site says the industry dominated Kent, especially the east of the county. It made roof tiles for ordinary houses, cooking pots and, for a time, decorated floor tiles: early ones from a kiln in Clowes Wood were laid at St Augustine's Abbey, Christ Church Priory and St Gregory's Priory in Canterbury, and at St Mary's Abbey in Faversham. Decorated tiles stopped by 1325 and pottery by the early 15th century, but roof tiles were still being fired in the 1800s.

Some of the kilns lie under today's campus. Excavations in the 1960s and 1970s found two unusual bottle-shaped kilns on the site of Darwin College and kiln debris near Eliot College, and in 2000 the television archaeologists of Time Team uncovered a nearly intact tile kiln at Tyler Hill. Part of the industry was made a scheduled monument in December 2018.

In 1830 the hill gained something entirely new. The railway known as the Crab and Winkle line, built to link Canterbury with a harbour on the north Kent coast, opened on 3 May 1830, and on its way north it passed under Tyler Hill through a single-track tunnel 757 metres long, climbing at 1 in 56. George Stephenson had taken control of the works by 1826.

Historic England lists the tunnel at Grade II* and calls it the world's first modern railway tunnel on the first passenger steam railway, though only by a narrow margin: the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened about four months later. The University of Kent itself describes it as the first purpose-built railway tunnel in Great Britain.

Train services ended in the early 1950s, but the tunnel stayed in the ground, and a century and a half after it was dug it caused trouble for its new neighbour. On the evening of 11 July 1974 part of it gave way under the campus and the Cornwallis Building sank by nearly a metre. The damaged corner was demolished and replaced with a new wing, and the northern part of the tunnel was partly filled in. Its blocked entrance can still be found beside the cycle path near the Giles Lane car park.

The university began as a county campaign. In 1959 the University Grants Committee invited bids for new universities, and Kent County Council's education committee set up a sub-committee to make Kent's case. The Sponsors of a University in Kent, chaired by Lord Cornwallis, first met in June 1960, and the government accepted the principle of a university in Kent on 18 May 1961.

Canterbury was chosen from several candidates, and the land was found on the ridge north of the city: three farms called Brotherhood, Beverley and Hothe Court, some 300 acres bought between 1962 and 1965. Beverley Farm straddled the boundary between the city and the county, one reason the new institution was named the University of Kent at Canterbury; New Zealand's University of Canterbury had objected to anything closer to its own name.

Sir William Holford, consultant architect from 1963, set out widely spaced buildings in an open green landscape looking down on the Cathedral and the old city in the valley. The Royal Charter was sealed on 4 January 1965, the day the poet T. S. Eliot died, and the first college was named after him. About 500 students arrived that autumn to a campus with a handful of buildings and a single college. Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, was installed as the first Chancellor on 30 March 1966, with Geoffrey Templeman as Vice-Chancellor from 1963 to 1980.

Rutherford College followed in 1966, Keynes in 1968 and Darwin in 1970. Eliot and Rutherford, designed by Anthony Wade on a cross-shaped plan, were given dining halls with views over to Bell Harry Tower, and the Gulbenkian Theatre opened in 1969.

Blean itself stayed a village of woods and fields. Its school opened on 12 November 1929 and is now Blean Primary. In a barn on Peter Firmin's land in the village, the small company he ran with Oliver Postgate, Smallfilms, made most of its animation; its programmes included Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, the Clangers and Bagpuss. Firmin died in 2018, aged 89.

Much of the woodland is now in the care of conservation charities. The RSPB manages its Blean Woods reserve from an entrance on Rough Common Road, and on 18 July 2022, shortly before 7am, Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust released bison into West Blean and Thornden Woods under the Wilder Blean project, the first wild bison in Britain for thousands of years.

On the hill the university kept growing. It became simply the University of Kent on 1 April 2003 and opened Woolf College in 2008, with Turing College after it. The collegiate system came to an end in 2025, though students still live at Darwin, Keynes, Woolf and Turing. In August 2026 Kent completed its merger with the University of Greenwich to form the London and South East University Group, known as LASE, keeping its own name: students still apply to, study at and graduate from the University of Kent.