Qualla: Herne Bay Museum and Gallery

Herne Bay Museum and Gallery: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Linda Spashett Storye_book, CC BY 3.0. Between 6 April and 13 May 1943, Royal Air Force test crews dropped prototype bombs into the shallow sea off Reculver, three miles east of Herne Bay. The bombs were Barnes Wallis's invention - rotating cylinders designed to skip across water like flat stones, bypass torpedo nets, and strike the side of a ship below the waterline. The dummy versions used here were filled with 'checol,' a mixture of concrete and chalk, to simulate the weight of high explosive. Some skipped. Some sank. Most stayed on the seabed, lost to the silt and the war's priorities. In 1997, more than fifty years later, the British Army located one of them and brought it ashore. It now sits in a Georgian house on William Street in Herne Bay, alongside Anglo-Saxon glass beakers, fossil sharks' teeth, and a baby's gas mask - the unlikely centrepiece of a museum a community had to fight to keep.

Image: Linda Spashett Storye_book | CC BY 3.0

Herne Bay Museum and Gallery: Sixty Million Years on William Street

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Linda Spashett Storye_book, CC BY 3.0. The Seaside Museum's collections sprawl across timescales that no town this size has any right to display. Fossils older than mammals share rooms with Stone Age hand axes; the hand axes share rooms with Anglo-Saxon glass from the cemetery at Marshside and Roman pottery from the f...

Image: Linda Spashett Storye_book | CC BY 3.0

Herne Bay Museum and Gallery: Dr Tom Bowes and the Salvaged Past

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Linda Spashett Storye_book, CC BY 3.0. Without Thomas Armstrong Bowes, none of it would be here. Dr Bowes - born 1869, died 1954 - was the local GP, but his actual life's work was rescuing the town's history from the workmen who kept digging it up. F. W. J. Palmer, Council Surveyor between 1891 and 1915, was constantl...

Image: Linda Spashett Storye_book | CC BY 3.0

Herne Bay Museum and Gallery: The Bouncing Bomb

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paste at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The Highball was the smaller cousin of the Upkeep bomb that broke the Ruhr dams in May 1943 during Operation Chastise - the raid commemorated in The Dam Busters and its memorable Eric Coates march. Where Upkeep would be dropped from Lancaster bombers against dams, Highball was in...

Image: Paste at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Herne Bay Museum and Gallery: Saved by Two Thousand Fans

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Linda Spashett (Storye book), CC BY 3.0. In 2009 the museum was placed under threat of closure. Canterbury City Council voted in 2011 to close its museums entirely, citing budget pressures, though they agreed to fund operations through the 2010-11 financial year while seeking alternative arrangements. The response was s...

Image: Linda Spashett (Storye book) | CC BY 3.0