Kent Life

Kent Life (Formerly the Museum of Kent Life.) is an English open-air museum located at Sandling, next to Allington Locks, on the east bank of the River Medway.

Sir Garrard Tyrwhitt-Drake bequeated the Cobtree Manor Estate to Maidstone Borough Council in 1966. A part of the estate was Sandling Farm, on the banks of the Medway. In 1984 a decision was made to restore the derelict farm as part of a rural life museum. The museum opened to the public on July 6, 1985.

At the museum, various aspects of farming are recreated. There are two small hop gardens, growing Fuggles and Goldings hops. Apple and plum orchards, a herb garden, a soft fruit garden and various livestock.

The museum has a variety of buildings, most of which have been dismantled and re-erected at the museum.

A five bay barn dating from the eighteenth century and originally at Vale Farm, Calcott, near Sturry. The barn has an oak frame and a thatched roof. It was dismantled in 1984 and re-erected at the museum in 1989.

The chapel is a timber framed building clad in corrugated iron (a tin tabernacle). It was originally built in 1897 in Cuxton and was donated to the museum in 2000 when a new chapel was built.

Originally called Old Cottage and Water Street Cottage, these cottages stood at Lenham. The Grade II listed building were threatened by the building of the Channel Tunnel rail link. The builder of the link offered the cottages to the museum, along with the funding for their removal and re-erection. They were dismantled in June 1999, and re-erected between January 2000 and March 2001, opening to the public in July 2001.

A late-eighteenth-century farmhouse. Petts Farmhouse is a Grade II* listed building.

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