A message from the President-Elect

It’s a great honour to have been appointed the President-Elect of the Kent Archaeological Society. First of all, I want to express thanks to my predecessor,

Gerald Cramp. He took up the position in 2016 during the AGM then after the Society had tragically and wholly unexpectedly lost two of its key officials, including the previous President. In the last four years, he has consolidated the Society a time of almost perpetual change. He did that with patience, great kindness, and with the benefit for his long experience of archaeology in Kent. It is wonderful that he will continue a very active role in the Society as Vice President. We will benefit immensely from his knowledge and experience.

My professional work involves geographies and issues ostensibly about as far away from Kent as it would seem possible. Since 1994, I have worked in, on, and studied Asia, and in particular China. This was somewhat of an accident. Nothing from my background until the 1990s indicated this was the path I’d chose to take. I was born in Kent, in 1968, in

West Kingsdown, and my family largely came from this area – the Sevenoaks Weald at least on my maternal grandfather’s side, via Ash and Ridley. I went to school here – to Dartford Grammar School. And wherever

I have been based, I have always returned here.

I studied English Literature and Philosophy at Caius College, Cambridge (a place, I was reminded recently in an alumni communication from them that was founded in 1348 – the time of a previous, very terrible plague, but which survived and prospered!) Chinese language, history and ideas were utterly peripheral to me until I took up a teaching post in Japan in 1990. A side visit to Beijing that year fascinated me so profoundly that, in Australia a year later, I started studying Mandarin – and completed a post- graduate degree in the language back in London.

In the mid-1990s I was based in the Inner Mongolian region of northern China (not, I often have to explain, the independent Mongolia across the border). In 1998, I entered the British Foreign Office diplomatic service and worked in London, then as First Secretary in Beijing, before heading the Indonesia and East Timor Section. Trying to make sense of UK visa policy as the policy head of the joint Home Office/ FCO UK Visas in 2005 convinced me that there were more manageable things to do with life. Over 1998 to 2004, I had completed a doctorate in Chinese language and history during the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China in the 1960s. I moved to be first Senior Fellow, and then Head of Asia Programme at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) a wonderful place to which I am still, as an Associate, affiliated to this day. In 2012, I moved to Sydney, Australia, to be head of the China Studies Centre, and Professor of Chinese Politics. Three and a half years later, I came back to Britain to my current position, as Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.

I have written twenty books on aspects of Chinese politics, history, culture and identity. The most recent, published in Beijing in Chinese and English (Five Cities in China) gives an indication of why, despite this massive difference between the place I study and try to understand professionally, and the one I have such deep interest to and affection for where I now live (I am based in Canterbury). Writing about my favourite Chinese cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, Hohhot and Hong Kong – I refer to how in all of these the past, despite waves of dramatic modernisation in recent decades, is still inscribed in buildings, the landscape, and the memory traces that one can find physically, but also in the way people in these places think and speak.

That fascination with place is something I learned, and am still learning, from Kent. This county is ancient and has almost endless remnants, some vast, some tiny, some visible, some hidden, of the human and non- human past. From the caves where the Harrisons in the 19th century found signs of very early human habitation at Oldbury near Ightham, to the deeply mysterious megaliths dotted around the Medway from Kit’s Coty, to the Countless Stones, to the remains in the fabric, above and below ground, of the earliest churches built in Britain during the reconversion to Christianity in the 6th century, this county contains pretty much not just the story of Britain, but also the story of Britain’s place in the world. It has served as a transit place, a place of arrival from the continent, and of departure.

It has been a place of war, most recently during the heroic sky battles and the endurance against bombing in the Second World War, and of events of immense political importance – the murder of Becket, of which the 850th anniversary will be marked this year – and the various grassroots uprisings that dot history from the Medieval period almost to the current day (remember the participation in national protests defending mining in the 1980s by some of the remaining coal plants in Kent).

Kent has a story that is so rich and multifaceted that it is very hard to tell it in a straightforward way. We know this because the KAS has been trying to do that since 1857. The history of this amazing county has been enough to fill annual issues of the Archaeologica Cantiana almost continuously down to today. It has also served as a place where increasing numbers of people are still discovering, through digs and document research, facts, issues and happenings that had been forgotten or are outside the scope of human history.

In the coming months and years, despite the genuine challenges we all face today, I want to work in the KAS, and with as many people as possible, to continue to tell that story, and to pass on a passion for it to new groups, younger people and people from outside our area. My interest is in how the literature of this particular locality helps to understand this Kent Story. Figures from Chaucer (more based in Eltham than ever having been to Canterbury), Shakespeare (who may have played at Chilham, Faversham, and Fordwich), Dickens (who almost made the county his own through his extensive writings about, and in, Kent) and to the current day – Ian Fleming, Russel Hoban, Jocelyn Brooke, T S Eliot, to name a very few) have all had tangible links.

Some lived here (H G Wells, in Folkestone), some were born here (Elizabethan poet Thomas Wyatt), some died here (Joseph Conrad), and some set large parts of their work here (Somerset Maugham, about

Tercanbury – the place we call Canterbury). Along with the material remnants and legacy of the past, these serve as one which exists in the form of words, and often through imagination. I can’t think of many places that have figured this way in the lives and words of such a remarkable set of authors (there are many, many more) – even London. That alone makes Kent unique.

But there are many other ways in which this is true.

I look forward to meeting members, and to working with people in the Society, as we move forward. We have plans to raise our profile, and to contribute more to the ways in which people across the county engage with, understand and relate to the environment they live and often work in. It is an immense privilege to be able to do this, and I am excited about what may develop over the coming few years, and how we can prepare the Society for the coming century or more.

Kerry Brown, President-Elect