Neighbour to a power station
and the UK’s second largest deepwater container
port, this ancient coastal village lies on The
Isle of Grain, which is no longer an island due to
silting up of a local creek. Roman tiling is built
into the fabric of St James' Church which has a
tongue-sticker (a grotesque pagan fertility
symbol) over one of its doors. Queen Victoria used
Grain as a departure point for trips to Germany
and ‘Port Victoria’ was built as a rail station at
the end of a line from Windsor. Later Grain became
synonymous with oil refining. In 1944 petrol was
pumped to Allied invasion forces in France via a
seabed pipeline
