Whitstable Grotters – How to create your own
By Whitstable
On the beach beside the Whitstable Oyster Company there’s a huge pile of oyster shells. Most of the year you can’t touch it — the shells are saved to help rebuild the oyster beds — but on one night during the Oyster Festival you’re invited to grab a bucketful and build a grotter. It’s one of the loveliest traditions the town has, and it goes back a great deal further than you might think.
What is a grotter?
A grotter is a little grotto built from oyster shells and lit from within by a candle — dozens of them glowing along the shore after dark. The name is simply the local, spoken form of “grotto.” They come in all shapes and sizes, from grand affairs with thick walls and roofs to a single low ring of shells. Once you get the knack, as they say, the world is your Whitstable oyster.
Where the custom comes from
The grotter is far older than the festival, and its story is a good one. Its roots are religious: the scallop shell is the emblem of St James, and for medieval pilgrims who couldn’t make the long journey to his shrine at Santiago de Compostela, building or visiting a little grotto of shells was a substitute act of devotion. St James’s Day fell in high summer — and, by happy coincidence, early August (Old-Style St James’s Day, 5 August) was when the London oyster season opened. There was even an old proverb: eat oysters on St James’s Day, and you’ll never want for money.
By the 1800s the religious meaning had largely fallen away, and the grotto had become a children’s custom. Because oysters were then a cheap, everyday food — sold by the million in London, at four a penny — shells were everywhere, and children would build grottos on the pavement, light them with a candle-end, and call out to passers-by for a coin: “Please remember the grotto — it’s only once a year.” The earliest written record of it dates to 1823.
The custom slowly died out across the country by about the 1960s — but Whitstable, fittingly, brought it back. Since the Oyster Festival revived it in the late 1980s, the town’s children (and plenty of adults) have gathered on the beach each year to build their grotters once more. When you build one, you’re taking part in something with centuries behind it.
How to build your own Whitstable grotter
A word on when and where
Grotter-building happens on the beach during the Whitstable Oyster Festival each September. It’s a genuinely magical evening — well worth timing a visit around, and a lovely thing to do with children.
If you’ve grotter memories of your own — or know more about the old custom — we’d love to hear.