Sturry Village, Kent, Part 2 a Guided Tour Using Old Postcards

The most important era for Sturry, determining its future shape, size, function and name, was that part of the early 5th century when the beleaguered Romano-Britons brought in Frisians and Jutes as mercenaries to help them fight against invading Picts and Scots, and rewarded them with land. Some of them settled near Sturry: their cemetery was found at Hersden. Some time after, Kent was re-organised into lathes, or districts. Sturry was the first; Stour-gau, meaning district or lathe on the Stour. The lathe was bounded by the Stour as far as Canterbury in the North by the sea, and farther south as distant as Wye.
The Second World War
During the Second World War, Sturry was bombed, the greater part of the High Street being destroyed by a parachute mine in 1941 during the Baedeker Blitz, killing 15 people of which seven were children aged 12 and under. One of these was a little girl who had been to the bakers' and whose body was recovered still clutching the bag of buns she had bought.
The same aircraft dropped another bomb, but this landed amongst the allotments. In the book Letters to Sturry, it is recorded that on Wednesday 28 August 1940, there were eight separate air-raid warnings and on 'Battle of Britain Day', 15 September 1940, a German Dornier bomber plane (Aircraft 2651, 3rd Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 76), crash-landed in a field below Kemberland Wood near the Sarre Penne stream. Three of the five crew were killed and were firstly buried in Sturry Cemetery but then reinterred in the late 1960s into the German war cemetery at Cannock Chase.
Nonetheless, a number of interesting buildings remain intact in Sturry, including the Manor House, built in 1583, which is now the junior school of The King's School, Canterbury.
Since the 1960s a large number of satellite housing estates have been built on the north side of the village, mostly in former woodland, which have turned Sturry into one of the major dormitory villages for Canterbury. Nonetheless, the village is still overwhelmingly rural, with fields for arable farming and livestock grazing, and large amounts of coppice woodland. A number of market gardens can also be found in the countryside around the village. Large and deep quarries are still worked on the edge of the village, with the old workings flooded to provide recreational lakes used primarily for fishing.

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