STURRY

 Sturry tends to get treated as a suburb of Canterbury, rather than a place in its' own right, even though it is well outside the city walls. I can easily remember when there were vast swathes of farmland between Northgate and the village of Sturry, farmland that is now almost all swallowed up with industrial and commercial parks. I only stopped to have a quick look round, on my way to Fordwich, nearby. 

You approach Sturry from Canterbury, by crossing the White Mill Bridge over the Great Stour. Sadly, the White Mill is no more, but still, I turned down Milner Lane by the river, just to see if there was anything worth looking at.

I found a gateway........now it is one of the entrances to King's Junior School. I could have walked down the path from here to the church, but the 'No Parking' signs were a bit off-putting, so I rode round to the other side of the village.

The gateway leads to Milner Court. See notes below.

Now, if you're on foot, you can access the combined Anglican/Methodist church from the main road, but again, there are parking issues. So I rode round through the old part of the village, and found a place to park close by the church and the King's School Buildings.

After all that, it was closed.

Directly opposite is a beautiful long barn, now one of the parts of the King's Junior School.

The Tithe Barn is a barn dating from the early 16th century. The barn was built as the tithe barn for the grange of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury. At the Dissolution of the monasteries, the grange came into the ownership of Thomas Smythe who converted some of the buildings into a country house, Sturry Court. The barn continued in use for agricultural storage. In the early 20th century, Sturry Court was the country home of Alfred Milner who renamed it Milner Court. On his death in 1925, his widow, Violet, gifted the estate to The King's School, Canterbury which operated a preparatory school on the site. The school was opened by Rudyard Kipling, a friend of the Milners, in 1929. The site is now the Junior School for The King's School and the tithe barn has been restored and repurposed as a performing arts centre. The tithe barn is a Grade I listed structure.