Portal:Kent/Sandbox

Cliffe is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Cliffe and Cliffe Woods, in the borough of Medway in the ceremonial county of Kent, England. It is on the Hoo Peninsula, reached from the Medway Towns by a three-mile (4.8 km) journey along the B2000 road. Situated upon a low chalk escarpment overlooking the Thames marshes, Cliffe offers views of Southend-on-Sea and London. In 774 Offa, King of Mercia, built a rustic wooden church dedicated to St Helen, a popular Mercian saint who was by legend the daughter of Coel ("Old King Cole") of Colchester. Cliffe is cited in early records as having been called Clive and Cliffe-at-Hoo. In 1961 the parish had a population of 2239. On 1 April 1997 the parish was abolished to form "Cliffe & Cliffe Woods", part of which consisting of Frindsbury Extra. (Full article...)

The 2019 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 12 December 2019, with 47,074,800 registered voters entitled to vote to elect 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. The governing Conservative Party, led by the prime minister Boris Johnson, won a landslide victory with a majority of 80 seats, a net gain of 48, on 43.6 per cent of the popular vote, the highest percentage for any party since the 1979 general election, though with a narrower popular vote margin than that achieved by the Labour Party over the Conservatives at the 1997 general election. This was the second national election to be held in 2019 in the United Kingdom, the first being the 2019 European Parliament election. (Full article...)

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy. As the UK's biggest public service department it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. It is the second largest governmental department in terms of employees, and the second largest in terms of expenditure (£228bn as of July 2021^[update]). (Full article...)

A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented selective secondary school. (Full article...)

The County Championship, currently known for sponsorship reasons as the Vitality County Championship, is the only domestic first-class cricket competition in England and Wales. Established in 1890, it is organised by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) as a two-league system. The tournament is contested by eighteen clubs representing the historic counties of England and (in one case) Wales. The reigning champions are Surrey. (Full article...)

Ashford International railway station is a National Rail station in the town of Ashford, Kent, England. It connects several railway lines, including High Speed 1 and the South Eastern Main Line. Services are operated by Southeastern and Southern. (Full article...)

Smallfilms is a British television production company that made animated TV programmes for children from 1959 until the 1980s. In 2014 the company began operating again, producing a new series of its most famous show, The Clangers, but it became dormant again in 2017, after production of the show was slightly changed. It was originally a partnership between Oliver Postgate (who wrote the scripts, animated the characters, and voiced many of the characters) and Peter Firmin (who made the models of the characters and drew the artwork). Several popular series of short films were made using stop-motion animation, including Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine. Another Smallfilms production, Bagpuss, came top of a BBC poll to find the favourite British children's programme of the 20th century. (Full article...)

Dame Tracey Karima Emin DBE RA (/ˈɛmɪn/; born 3 July 1963) is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician. (Full article...)

Blackheath Football Club is a rugby union club based in Well Hall, Eltham, in south-east London. (Full article...)

The English Channel, also known as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Southern England from northern France. It links to the southern part of the North Sea by the Strait of Dover at its northeastern end. It is the busiest shipping area in the world. (Full article...)

Sevenoaks is a local government district in west Kent, England. Its council is based in the town of Sevenoaks. (Full article...)

The Darent is a Kentish tributary of the River Thames and takes the waters of the River Cray as a tributary in the tidal portion of the Darent near Crayford. 'Darenth' is frequently found as the spelling of the river's name in older books and maps, Bartholomew's Canals and River of England being one example. Bartholomew's Gazetteer (1954) demonstrates that Darent means "clear water", a result of it springing from and running through chalk. The purity of the water was a major factor in the development of paper and pharmaceuticals in the area. (Full article...)

Dungeness (UK: /ˌdʌndʒəˈnɛs/, UK: /ˌdʌndʒˈnɛs/) is a headland on the coast of Kent, England, formed largely of a shingle beach in the form of a cuspate foreland. It shelters a large area of low-lying land, Romney Marsh. Dungeness spans Dungeness Nuclear Power Station, the hamlet of Dungeness, and an ecological site at the same location. It lies within the civil parish of Lydd. (Full article...)

The Richter scale (/ˈrɪktər/), also called the Richter magnitude scale, Richter's magnitude scale, and the Gutenberg–Richter scale, is a measure of the strength of earthquakes, developed by Charles Richter in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg, and presented in Richter's landmark 1935 paper, where he called it the "magnitude scale". This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or M_L . (Full article...)

Yalding is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Maidstone in Kent, England. The village is situated 6 miles (9.7 km) south west of Maidstone at a point where the Rivers Teise and Beult join the River Medway. At the 2001 census, the parish, which includes the villages of Benover, Laddingford and Queen Street, had a population of 2,236. increasing to 2,418 at the 2011 Census. (Full article...)

Kent was a parliamentary constituency covering the county of Kent in southeast England. It returned two "knights of the shire" (Members of Parliament) to the House of Commons by the bloc vote system from the year 1290. Members were returned to the Parliament of England until the Union with Scotland created the Parliament of Great Britain in 1708, and to the Parliament of the United Kingdom after the union with Ireland in 1801 until the county was divided by the Reform Act 1832. (Full article...)

Westerham is a town and civil parish in the Sevenoaks District of Kent, England. It is located 3.4 miles east of Oxted and 6 miles west of Sevenoaks, adjacent to the Kent border with both Greater London and Surrey.
It is recorded as early as the 9th century, and was mentioned in the Domesday Book in a Norman form, Oistreham (compare Ouistreham in Normandy, Oistreham in 1086). Hām is Old English for a village or homestead, and so Westerham means a westerly homestead. The River Darent flows through the town, and formerly powered three watermills. The total population in 2021 was 4,498. (Full article...)

Hythe (/ˈhaɪð/) is a market town and civil parish on the edge of Romney Marsh in Kent, England. Hythe is an Old English word meaning haven or landing place. (Full article...)

Greensand or green sand is a sand or sandstone which has a greenish color. This term is specifically applied to shallow marine sediment that contains noticeable quantities of rounded greenish grains. These grains are called glauconies and consist of a mixture of mixed-layer clay minerals, such as smectite and glauconite. Greensand is also loosely applied to any glauconitic sediment. (Full article...)

Upnor Castle is an Elizabethan artillery fort located on the west bank of the River Medway in Kent. It is in the village of Upnor, opposite and a short distance downriver from the Chatham Dockyard, at one time a key naval facility. The fort was intended to protect both the dockyard and ships of the Royal Navy anchored in the Medway. It was constructed between 1559 and 1567 on the orders of Elizabeth I, during a period of tension with Spain and other European powers. The castle consists of a two-storeyed main building protected by a curtain wall and towers, with a triangular gun platform projecting into the river. It was garrisoned by about 80 men with a peak armament of around 20 cannon of various calibres. (Full article...)

Blackfriars, also known as London Blackfriars, is a central London railway station and connected London Underground station in the City of London. It provides Thameslink services: local (from North to South London), and regional (Bedford and Cambridge to Brighton) and limited Southeastern commuter services to South East London and Kent. Its platforms span the River Thames, the only station in London to do so, along the length of Blackfriars Railway Bridge, a short distance downstream from Blackfriars Bridge. There are two station entrances – one on each side of the Thames – along with a connection to the London Underground District and Circle lines. (Full article...)

Canterbury Cathedral is the cathedral of the archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Church of England and symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Located in Canterbury, Kent, it is one of the oldest Christian structures in England and forms part of a World Heritage Site. Its formal title is the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ, Canterbury. (Full article...)

The 2024 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, 4 July 2024, to elect 650 members of Parliament to the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The opposition Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, defeated the governing Conservative Party, led by Rishi Sunak, in a landslide victory. (Full article...)

Royal Tunbridge Wells is a town in Kent, England, 30 miles (50 kilometres) southeast of central London. It lies close to the border with East Sussex on the northern edge of the High Weald, whose sandstone geology is exemplified by the rock formation High Rocks. The town was a spa in the Restoration and a fashionable resort in the mid-1700s under Beau Nash when the Pantiles, and its chalybeate spring, attracted visitors who wished to take the waters. Though its popularity as a spa town waned with the advent of sea bathing, the town still derives much of its income from tourism. (Full article...)

Domesday Book (/ˈduːmzdeɪ/ DOOMZ-day; the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book") is a manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of King William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by the Latin name Liber de Wintonia, meaning "Book of Winchester", where it was originally kept in the royal treasury. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 1085 the king sent his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings and dues owed to him. (Full article...)