Exhibitions at the Powell-Cotton Museum
Powell-Cotton Museum holds a number of exhibitions and events each year that add further attraction to a visit.
New exhibition from May - end August 2010
THE FORGOTTEN FRONTLINE
If you know where to look, the traces of war are still to be found along the Kent coastline. All still there 70 years after the Second World War began - for the north Kent coast was once part of Britain’s frontline. Concrete blocks, known as dragons’ teeth were sown in the ground in their hundreds to stop tanks. Some remain, like rotting teeth.
Crumbling pillboxes, originally camouflaged as farm buildings, cottages or even haystacks, are hidden in undergrowth. Stunted remains of scaffold poles, once part of our first line of coastal defence, stick from the mud at low tide.
As the nation braced itself for the likelihood of a Nazi invasion the coastline was defended with what was known as the “coastal crust” - a scaffold pole fence strung with barbed wire and backed-up with minefields, anti-tank traps and pillboxes.
Now those dark days are being recalled in a new exhibition, the Forgotten Frontline, which is on display at the Powell-Cotton Museum, Quex opens from May and runs until end August 2010.
Local historian and archaeologist, Mark Harrison has been gathering material for the exhibition for the last two or three years.
“Many people have had remarkable stories to tell about wartime Whitstable,” he said. “But others have no idea of what life was like living under the shadow of enemy attack from sea or air at any time.
“The purpose of the exhibition is to show how the area from Seasalter to Swalecliffe prepared for war and faced up to the very real prospect of a German invasion.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a wall display of aerial photographs showing many of the wartime defensive structures in the Whitstable area.
The photographs were taken by the RAF as part of a national survey in 1946 to assess the damage inflicted by the war