Whitstable Castle and Gardens
By Whitstable
Whitstable Castle isn’t a castle at all, really — it’s an elegant former manor house, wrapped in beautiful gardens that look out towards the sea, and today it’s one of the loveliest free places to spend an afternoon in the town. Its story is a remarkable one: it began, of all things, as a chemical works, passed through the hands of a copperas magnate and a silk millionaire, and is now a community treasure. Here’s how it came to be.
From copperas works to country house
The Castle stands on the site of one of Whitstable’s old copperas works — the coastal chemical industry that, for two centuries, gathered “copperas stones” from the shore to make green vitriol for dyes and ink. The trade was still flourishing in the late eighteenth century, when the Castle’s story begins, and it had died away by the end of the 1820s.
In 1780, Charles Pearson — a London haberdasher and ambitious copperas producer — married Elizabeth Radford, who already owned three-and-a-half copperas works of her own; it may well have been the shared business that brought them together. Pearson went on to control much of the Kent and Essex copperas trade, and around 1790, following the fashionable pull of the seaside, he built a summer residence for his family on the hill above the works: a Gothic, octagonal tower the family called Tankerton Hill. That tower is the core of the Castle you see today.
In 1791 Pearson bought the manorial title of Whitstable too, setting himself up as a country gentleman, and the family enlarged the house over the following decades.
Wynn Ellis — the silk millionaire
In time the estate passed to Charles Pearson’s son. Charles Pearson Junior invested in the new Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, the “Crab and Winkle” line that opened in 1830, and built an hotel, the Pearson’s Arms, beside the Tower grounds to serve its travellers. It did well for a few years, but trade soon faded, and in 1835 he was declared bankrupt. Wynn Ellis, who had been buying up his mortgages since 1832, owned the Tower by 1836. He was a relative by marriage, and one of the most colourful figures ever to live here.
Born in 1790, the son of a coachman, Ellis rose to build a thriving silk importing business in London, became a Member of Parliament, a noted art collector and a considerable philanthropist. He made the greatest mark of any owner on the Castle and its grounds: he added a long west front and a clock and bell tower, and had the gardens landscaped by Dr Alexander Garry, a noted plant collector. Nor was it his wife he brought to live there. The house was home instead to his mistress of some years, Susan Lloyd, and in 1845 a deed of settlement gave her and their daughter a life interest in the Tower and its estate. His generosity to the town outlived him — the Wynn Ellis Almshouses, just past the Castle gatehouse, were built from his charitable bequest, and he is buried at All Saints Church in Whitstable.
From Tankerton Hill to Whitstable Castle
The building’s name changed as it grew grander. What began as Tankerton Hill became Tankerton Tower, then The Towers, and finally Whitstable Castle — the name it carries today. After Ellis, it passed through several private hands until Whitstable Urban District Council bought it for the town in 1935.
A community treasure, restored
By the early 2000s the Castle needed rescuing, and the town rose to it. A charity, the Whitstable Castle Trust, was formed to take on the whole site, and in 2008 — backed by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of over £2 million, with support from Canterbury City Council — the Castle closed for a major restoration. It reopened transformed: the building repaired, the gardens beautifully relandscaped, access improved throughout. Today the Castle and Gardens are run by the Trust, a charitable body of local volunteers and councillors, for the benefit of the town — and it shows.
The Castle today
The gardens are free and open to all — terraced lawns, a scented rose garden, herbaceous borders and views out towards the Thames Estuary. The Bistro and the dog-friendly Wynn Ellis Tearoom serve breakfast and lunch every day, and the Castle keeps a full calendar through the year, from fairs to murder mystery evenings. It is an easy, lovely walk up from the Tankerton seafront, and one of the best-kept and most welcoming places in the town.
If you have a memory or an old photograph of the Castle, we’d love to hear.