(Re)Visions of the ‘Garden of England’: Moving through the Kent Landscape in Twenty-First Century Britain

In the cultural imaginary, the county of Kent has long been associated with rural journeying, especially long-distance walks through its downland interior. These routes often evoke an image of Kent as the ‘Garden of England’, closely aligned with visual traditions of the picturesque and the nostalgic impulse of post-war travel campaigns. Taking our cue from recent scholarship including Phil Hubbard’s Borderland: Identity and Belonging at the Edge of England (2022) and public artworks such as Ackroyd and Harvey’s Ash to Ash (2018–2025), while remaining attentive to older reference points such as Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), this article draws on a series of shared walks to re-visit, re-view and re-think this imagery. Moving along the North Downs Way, it reads the landscape through a range of visual artefacts encountered or recalled in situ, considering how the ‘Garden of England’ is sustained, subverted or reworked in the twenty-first century.