History of the Kent Show
The first Kent County Show was held in July 1923, at Wombwell Park, Gravesend which attracted 15,000 people and 883 entries in the livestock sections. A variety of different sites were used before 1939, Ashford, Sevenoaks, Folkestone and Canterbury have all hosted the Kent County Show before 1964.
The Show was cancelled during World War 2, however in 1946 the Kent County Show resumed again to be held each year on 30 acres of Mote Park, Maidstone. A proud ‘although really wet’ year was 1949, the 20th Show, when national newspapers headlined the news the ‘Farmer Winston Gets First Prize’. With his only entry, Winston Churchill, who owned several hundred acres and a herd of pedigree dairy cows at Westerham, gained a first in the ‘cow in calf’ class and put in a personal appearance to claim his prize.
A variety of factors made a permanent showground increasingly desirable in the late 1950s and a number of locations were considered before the Kent County Agricultural Society decided on 120 acres – ‘a bleak naked site with only broken bottles to drive over and from which thousands of tons of stones had to be removed’ – at Detling on the A249, alongside the site of a wartime RAF Battle of Britain grass airfield.
It was used for the first time in 1964 and since then the ground’s attractiveness has been progressively enhanced with some 7,000 trees planted to improve the landscaping. Facilities have been increased enormously in many ways and continue to be improved to this day.
The Show has been hit over the last 76 years with various outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, economic depressions, bad weather and sites which lacked adequate hard standing, electricity and water facilities. However, the Kent Show remains the shop window for rural Kent life attracting around 100,000 visitors each year.