Sturry

Human habitation in Sturry is thought to have started around 430,000 years ago, as dated flint implements - namely knives and arrow-tips - show. Other signs of early human activities include a collection of axes and pottery shards from the Bronze Age and more pottery from the Sturry Hill gravel-pits, and a burial-ground near Stonerocks Farm showed that there was an Iron Age settlement of Belgic Celts (who gave Canterbury its pre-Roman name of Durovernum) from the end of the 2nd century BC. All this evidence indicates that human habitation of some kind existed on the north bank of the River Stour, on Sturry's site, for hundreds and thousands of years. When the Romans arrived, they built…

During the Second World War, Sturry was bombed, the greater part of the High Street being destroyed by a parachute mine in 1941 during the Baedeker Blitz, killing 15 people of which seven were children aged 12 and under. One of these was a little girl who had been to the bakers' and whose body was recovered still clutching the bag of buns she had bought. The same aircraft dropped another bomb, but this landed amongst the allotments. In the book Letters to Sturry, it is recorded that on Wednesday 28 August 1940, there were eight separate air-raid warnings and on 'Battle of Britain Day', 15 September 1940, a German Dornier bomber plane (Aircraft 2651, 3rd Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 76),…