How Herne Bay grew between Reculver's towers and its long pier

Long before there was a town on the bay, the headland three miles to the east mattered to Rome. A fort was built at Reculver to guard the northern mouth of the Wantsum Channel, the strip of water that then cut the Isle of Thanet off from the mainland. The Romans called it Regulbium; it was one of the earliest of the forts later grouped as the Saxon Shore, and archaeology suggests it was abandoned in the 370s.

In about 669 King Ecgberht of Kent granted land there to a priest named Bassa to found a monastery, and the church of St Mary rose near the centre of the old fort. By the 10th century the monastery had faded and the church served the parish. In the 12th century it gained the two tall towers that still stand on the skyline.

The sea did the rest. In 1540 the shore was still about a quarter of a mile north of the church, but by 1781 the north-west corner of the Roman fort had fallen away. In 1807 the vicar persuaded his parishioners to abandon the building, and in 1809 it was partly demolished, with some of its stone going into a new parish church at Hillborough. The towers were spared because ships steered by them, and in 1810 Trinity House bought what was left and built the first groynes to protect it. About half of the fort site has since been lost to erosion.

The town takes its name from Herne, the older village inland, first recorded around 1100 as Hyrnan, from the Old English hyrne, a corner. Herne's church of St Martin became a parish church in 1310, and in 1538 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer made Nicholas Ridley its vicar. Ridley held the post until 1550; it was at Herne that he had the choir sing the Te Deum in English rather than Latin.

On the coast below, the bay was little more than a landing place. One of its oldest buildings is The Ship, a late 18th-century inn at the heart of a small community of farmers and seafarers. Passenger and cargo boats ran to London, and colliers came down from Newcastle. The 1801 census counted 1,232 people in Herne and the bay together.

That quiet shore suited smugglers. A gang worked from the town in the early 19th century and fought a series of battles with the preventive men sent to stop contraband. The Admiralty had set up a Coast Blockade in 1817, and in 1821 one of its midshipmen, Sydenham Snow, was shot dead at Herne Bay. The gang was finally overpowered in the 1820s.

The modern town began with a pier. Parliament passed the Herne Bay Pier Act in 1831, and a group of London investors set about building a wooden pier and a promenade. Designed by Thomas Rhodes, an assistant to the engineer Thomas Telford, the pier was finished on 12 May 1832, and the steamer Venus brought the first passengers. From June 1833 a sail-driven trolley called Neptune's Car carried visitors along its length.

The investors wanted a new name for their new resort, St Augustine's, but residents disliked it and Herne Bay stuck. The Herne Parish Improvement Act of 1833 made the bay and the village separate towns, Christ Church opened in 1834 on land given by Sir Henry Oxenden, and the population rose from 1,876 in 1831 to 3,041 in 1841.

The seafront's best-known landmark belongs to the same decade. A wealthy widow from London paid for a clock tower on the parade, built in 1836–37 of Portland stone to a design by Edwin James Dangerfield. It is believed to be one of the earliest purpose-built, free-standing clock towers in the United Kingdom, and it has been Grade II listed since 1951.

Steamboats were running to London by the 1840s, but the railway changed the town's fortunes. The line from Faversham arrived on 13 July 1861, with a temporary station named Herne Bay and Hampton-on-Sea; when the line was carried on east along the coast on 5 October 1863, the present station opened. The pier company lost its passengers to the trains and failed, and its worm-eaten pier was taken down in 1870–71.

A short iron pier, only about 100 metres long, opened on 27 August 1873, but steamers could not berth at it. Work on a deep-water extension began on 26 August 1896, and the new iron pier was formally opened on 14 September 1899. At its full length it was second only to Southend's, and an electric tram carried visitors along it for a penny.

These were the town's best years: the population nearly doubled, from 4,410 in 1881 to 8,442 in 1901, and reached 14,533 by 1931. The urban district council bought the pier in 1909, and on 3 August 1910 the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Knill, opened the Grand Pier Pavilion at its landward end. At the east end of town, the East Cliff Pavilion opened on 4 April 1904; rebuilt as the King Edward VII Memorial Hall and opened by Princess Beatrice on 10 July 1913, it is today's King's Hall.

West of the centre, the sea was taking a whole settlement. Hampton-on-Sea grew up around an oyster company's pier, opened in 1866, and building plots were auctioned there between 1888 and 1890, but few houses were built and the cliffs kept retreating. Its last resident, Edmund Reid, a retired Metropolitan Police detective, left in 1916, and the last two houses were demolished in 1921. The stub of Hampton Pier and the Hampton Inn are what remain.

When war came, the long pier was a risk as well as an attraction. In June 1940 the army blew up two sections between the pavilion and the pier head so that it could not serve an invading force, and the gaps were bridged again later.

On 5 January 1941 the aviator Amy Johnson, ferrying an Airspeed Oxford for the Air Transport Auxiliary, came down in the Thames Estuary near Herne Bay, probably out of fuel in bad weather. She bailed out over the water and did not survive.

Two years later the shore east of Reculver became a test range. Prototypes of Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb were dropped off the coast there in 1943, and the full-size weapon, Upkeep, was used by 617 Squadron in the Dambusters raid of 16–17 May that year. A Highball, the smaller version, is one of the favourite exhibits at the Seaside Museum in the town.

The worst flood in the town's history came in 1953, and groynes, sea walls and a shingle beach followed. Steamer trips from the pier ended in 1963, the Grand Pier Pavilion burned down in June 1970, and on 1 April 1974 the pier passed to the city council.

Then came the storms. On 11 January 1978, and again in February 1979, heavy seas brought down the central section of the pier. What was left in between was dismantled in 1980, leaving a short stub on the shore and the pier head standing alone out at sea, the view that has defined the seafront ever since.

In the 1990s the old defences were judged too weak, and Neptune's Arm, an offshore breakwater, was built, with seafront regeneration following. The city council set up the Herne Bay Pier Trust as a charity in 2008, and the trust added a row of kiosks in 2012. On 17 September 2016 a statue of Amy Johnson was unveiled on the seafront, close to where she was last seen alive.