Shoreham at War

Our book 'Shoreham at War', based on our Village at War project, was published in April 2006. It is a hardback book with 216 pages and 50 illustrations. Copies are available free to all households in Shoreham as well as to all members of the Historical Society and all those who participated in our research. Copies may also be purchased from the Society for £9.99 (+£2.50 post and packaging) or from Shoreham Village Stores, The Hop Shop, Sevenoaks Bookshop and several other outlets. You can also order it from your local bookshop quoting the ISBN, 0-9539543-2-3.

The project was inspired by the BBC broadcast from Shoreham in April 1944, which described it as 'the most bombed village in Britain' (and of course there was still more to come!)

In 2003 Shoreham Historical Society decided to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2 by producing a book based on interviews with as many wartime residents of the village we could trace.
Many still lived in the village, but others had moved away and the war had brought many people to Shoreham for a stage in their lives - evacuee children from inner London, servicemen and women in the military camps, searchlight and barrage balloon sites, Land Girls on the farms, displaced persons and German and Italian POWs.
We placed an advertisement in Saga Magazine which had a surprising response from all over the UK.

Any research and publication needs money, so we applied to several funds.
The Kent Archaeological Society and the Kent History Fund helped us with small grants which funded the initial stage of the work and the purchase of our first mini-disc recorder.
Our main support came from the Local Heritage Initiative, which is administered by the Countryside Agency and financed from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Nationwide Building Society.
This enabled us to extend our project to include an exhibition which we held on VE Day 2005, set up a website and make a CD of our recordings.

Eventually we interviewed about 30 people, including three 1939 evacuees, and held a reunion of the 'Class of '36', the children who had enrolled at Shoreham School in September 1936. Our very successful exhibition was displayed on locations in West Kent. After our book was published in 2006 the project concluded with the handover of our recordings to the Imperial War Museum for conservation in their Sound Archives for future generations.