An Historical Atlas of Kent (2004) is a collection of short specialist essays from a wide range of academics and amateurs from all the contingent specialist disciplines which contribute to regional studies, enhanced by quality mapping by John Hills of Canterbury Christ Church University. Postgraduate theses such as Sheila Sweetinburgh’s University of Kent thesis on Sandwich and two recent studies of early modern Cranbrook by Anthony Poole (Roehampton University) and Lorraine Flisher (University of Greenwich) are exemplars of the strength of the discipline at university level. The first two studies have now been published in book form making their findings more immediately available to the local historian.⁶² But the range of postgraduate theses on Kent, by students throughout the country (and even abroad), is as extensive as it is varied, and can now be searched on-line.⁶³ The Rye and hinterlands research project c.1000 to c.1660 is being carried out with the assistance of volunteers with a great variety of skills, experience and local knowledge. This is an integrated project on the history, historic buildings and archaeology of Rye and its hinterlands led by Dr Gillian Draper, David and Barbara Martin, and Dr Alan Tyler.⁶⁴ And, finally the Kent contribution to the VCH’s EPE, led by a specialist academic local historian, Dr Andrew Hann, has relied for much of its primary research and local surveys on a large group of volunteers drawn from amateur local historians and students. The project is due to be completed by September 2007. Together with the main text by Hann, the volume includes two-page spreads compiled by volunteers and other local historians with interests in the industrial Medway. Many sites have been surveyed by volunteers overseen by professionals, and a large collection of data, much of it in digital format has been collected to be accessed on the project website.⁶⁵ And a new generation of local historians will be encouraged by the education project. The VCH has, not without much debate and some internal angst, striven to meet the challenges of twenty-first century approaches to local and regional history, while retaining the spirit of the nineteenth-century enthusiasts, adding paperback volumes and a website to the final goal of a new generation of red books.

ENDNOTES

   ¹  Archaeologia Cantiana, I (1858), Introduction, 12.
   ²  Ibid., 20.
   ³  Ibid., 111-123.
   ⁴  Ibid., 184-214. The journal continues in the next three volumes, II, 175-220; iii, 145-176; and iv, 131-202. Archaeologia Cantiana has continued to publish articles on Twysden and in 2004 Sue Petrie demonstrated the way the study of history has built on the work of previous generations and the wider opportunities and availability of sources; Sue Petrie, ‘The Religion of Sir Roger Twysden (1597-1672): a Case Study in Gentry Piety in Seventeenth-Century Kent’, Archaeologia Cantiana, CXXIV (2004), 137-162
   ⁵  P. Goubert, ‘Local History’, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter 1971, 115.