The Bumps in the Night

The town of Faversham in East Kent is better known for its breweries and surrounding hopyards and orchards than for gunpowder and things that go bump in the night. Yet it has as long an association with the explosives industry as almost any place in Britain. Edward Jacob, an eighteenth-century local historian, claimed that the town's first gunpowder works was established 'in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, if not before her time'. The only other early works were at Rotherhithe (known to exist in 1555) and Long Ditton, where George Evelyn, grandfather of the diarist, built a gunpowder works perhaps as early as 1561.