From Cinque Port to championship links: how Sandwich, Kent changed with its coastline

The name gives away the beginning. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the place as Sondwic in 851 and Sandwic in 993, and the Domesday Book of 1086 writes Sandwice; the usual reading is "the market town on sandy soil". It grew on the south bank of the River Stour, just upstream of where the river reached the Wantsum Channel, the strait that divided the Isle of Thanet from the rest of Kent and gave ships a sheltered passage between the Channel and the Thames estuary.

A haven on that route was worth money to whoever controlled it. In 1028 King Cnut granted the monks of Christ Church Priory a charter to run a ferry here and collect its tolls, an early sign that traffic through Sandwich already paid its way.

By the twelfth century Sandwich was one of the original Cinque Ports, with Hastings, New Romney, Hythe and Dover. A royal charter of 1155 set out the bargain: together the ports kept 57 ships ready for 15 days of the king's service each year, and in return they were excused taxes and tallage, held their own courts and, from the thirteenth century, sent members to Parliament. Smaller "limbs" shared the duty; those attached to Sandwich included its neighbour Stonar and, far off in Essex, Brightlingsea.

Kings came and went through the haven. Richard the Lionheart landed here on 13 March 1194 on his way home from captivity. In 1217, with Prince Louis of France claiming the English throne, a French fleet bringing him reinforcements was met off the coast on 24 August by English ships under Hubert de Burgh. The English captured the French flagship and most of the supply vessels, the admiral Eustace, a monk turned pirate, was executed after his capture, and Louis soon abandoned his attempt on the crown.

The town built its defences in the same centuries. The Fisher Gate on the Quay went up in 1384 and is the only one of the medieval town gates still standing. The Barbican, built late in the fourteenth century at the end of the bridge over the Stour, was later used as the toll house for the crossing.

Living this close to France had a price. On 28 August 1457 French raiders burned much of the town and killed its mayor, John Drury. Sandwich has not forgotten: the mayor still wears a black robe in mourning for him.

A century later the town was struggling, and help came from across the water. Letters patent from Elizabeth I, dated 6 July 1561, allowed Protestant refugees from Flanders to settle in Sandwich. The newcomers, known as the Strangers, brought weaving and silk-making and a skill for market gardening, and are credited with growing the first English celery. From 1564 St Peter's Church served as their own Strangers' church.

The Guildhall followed in 1579. It still stands in the town square, listed Grade II*, and its courtroom is still used for civic occasions.

The water that had made Sandwich gradually left it. The Wantsum silted up in the late Middle Ages and had dried out by the sixteenth century, and the Cinque Port that once sent ships to the king ended up about two miles (3 km) from open water, no longer a port at all. The Stour still bends past the Quay, but the sea trade went elsewhere.

The town's name travelled further than its ships. On 12 July 1660 Edward Montagu, who that May had commanded the fleet bringing Charles II home from the Dutch Republic, was created Earl of Sandwich. His descendant John Montagu, the 4th Earl, served three times as First Lord of the Admiralty; Captain Cook named the Sandwich Islands after him, and the meal of filling between two slices of bread still carries his title.

Inside the walls, life went on at a quieter pace. The central tower of St Peter's collapsed in 1661. In 1759 the radical writer Thomas Paine kept his home and shop at 20 New Street, and in 1760 the White Mill was built. The river crossing changed several times: a toll bridge opened in 1755, was rebuilt in Portland stone in 1773, and in 1892 gave way to a three-arch iron swing bridge that let boats through.

The railway arrived on 1 July 1847, when the South Eastern Railway opened Sandwich station on a new branch running south from its line across east Kent.

The dunes between the town and the shore found a new use in 1887, when the surgeon Laidlaw Purves founded Royal St George's. In 1894 it became the first club outside Scotland to host the Open Championship, won that year by J.H. Taylor. Prince's was completed next door in 1906 and staged the 1932 Open, which the American Gene Sarazen won while showing off his new sand iron. Ian Fleming later put Royal St George's into Goldfinger (1959) under the name Royal St Marks, and in 1912 Edwin Lutyens built The Salutation in the town.

Science arrived after the Second World War. In 1954 Pfizer acquired an 80-acre site on the edge of Sandwich and opened an animal-feed plant there the following year. It grew into a research centre employing more than 3,000 people, where medicines including the antifungal Diflucan were discovered.

Traffic reshaped the town as well. The old Toll Bridge could take only a single lane of motor traffic and by 1965 had become a notorious bottleneck on the A256. It was listed Grade II in 1976, the mayor collected the last toll on 30 September 1977, and in 1981 the Sandwich bypass took the main road round the town instead of through it.

In February 2011 Pfizer announced that it would close the research facility. In August 2012 it sold the freehold to Discovery Park Ltd, and the site became a science and technology park shared by many companies, with Pfizer still among them.

Royal St George's has stayed on the Open rota, hosting the championship roughly once a decade. Darren Clarke won there in 2011 and Collin Morikawa in 2021, the club's fifteenth Open. To carry the crowds, Sandwich station's platforms were lengthened by 80 metres between 2019 and early 2021 so that full 12-carriage trains could call. The AIG Women's Open is due at the club for the first time from 28 July to 1 August 2027.

The town's archive produced a surprise of its own. In 2014 an original 1300 issue of Magna Carta, filed alongside a copy of the Charter of the Forest, was identified in a nineteenth-century scrapbook belonging to Sandwich; the find was made public in February 2015. About a third of the text is gone and the seal is missing.