The Old Neptune stands directly on the shingle, which is not a figure of speech — the beer garden is the beach, and the pub itself has twice been demolished by the sea. A high tide and a northerly gale finished it in 1853, a great storm did it again in 1897, and each time it was rebuilt from the same salvaged timber. It started life as a beer house for the men of the boat yards. Now it serves Guinness-battered cod and dressed claw crab from £18, keeps Harvey's Sussex Best on always, and has live bands most weekends. Dogs are welcome inside and out. It appears in more or less every photograph anyone has ever taken of the town.
Whitstable is a shingle-beach town on the north Kent coast, six miles up from Canterbury, facing west across the Thames Estuary. Weatherboarded fishermen's cottages, wooden groynes and a working harbour make up the shoreline. Island Wall, the street nearest the sea, still has its row of mid-19th-century cottages. The sunsets over the estuary are the thing people come back for.
The town has been famous for oysters since at least the 1400s. At the peak, in 1862, sixty million of them went up to Billingsgate. You can still eat them where they're farmed: the Whitstable Oyster Company on the Horsebridge grows its natives just outside the door and serves them natural, Royale and Rockefeller, and it's in the 2026 Michelin Guide. Wheelers Oyster Bar on the High Street has been going since 1856 and runs from fish and chips to Japanese regional cuisine, which is a wide brief for one small room.
The food carries on inland. Staines the greengrocer claims the best vegetables in Whitstable and opens seven days a week; Hubbard's next door does the sourdough. There's Jim's Family Butchers, a cheesemonger called The Cheese Box on Harbour Street, and a run of independent shops around it — Harbour Books, Valentines Vintage, Flory & Black. The harbour market lives in the old net-drying huts.
For pubs beyond the Neptune, the Black Dog is a micropub at 66 High Street with no TVs and the music kept low on purpose. The Peter Cushing is a Wetherspoon's in a former music hall, named for the Hammer Horror actor who lived here from 1958 until his death in 1994 and stocks film memorabilia to prove it. Gretchen Kelly, writing in Forbes, called the place "an oyster lover's Woodstock."
The Crab and Winkle Way runs 7.6 miles to Canterbury, flat and traffic-free, partly along the trackbed of the world's first steam passenger railway, which opened in 1830 and closed for good in 1952. It passes through Blean Woods, the largest ancient broadleaved woodland in southern Britain. Closer in, the Tankerton Slopes look down on beach huts and "The Street," a shingle spit that runs half a mile out to sea and can be walked when the tide is out.
Trains reach London Victoria and St Pancras roughly every half hour; the A299 handles the cars. At the oyster festival each summer, children still build grotters — small grottos of oyster shells with a tealight inside — the way they once did to earn a penny from passers-by.