Churches of the British Isles

Mortimer Street Independent Chapel sat on the southern side of Mortimer Street, where the Co-op now stands (a Tesco from March 2025). Its car park on the High Street side was the chapel's burial ground. An early plan of the then-new street layout from Capper's 1833 guide book shows how early houses were still centred around 'The Ship'. Joseph Hanson, a Londoner, established this chapel in the area for nonconformists in the 1820s, running to 1864.

St Peter's at Greenhill is on Herne Drive in Greenhill, part of a relatively new estate of houses put up on Herne Bay's southern boundaries from the 1970s onwards. The church is a hall, complete with stage, which can be used for meetings during the week. On Sundays, the front end is opened up, and it becomes a church. To one side there is a Garden of Remembrance where ashes can be interred. The church is 'twinned' with St Martin's in Herne (below).

St Martin of Tours Church is in the village of Herne, which is the 'mother town' of Herne Bay. There was, without doubt, a much older church on the site than the one which now stands here, and some of its Norman stones, moulded and carved, may be seen in the walls of the porch and west front of the present nave. Deeds of gift of the thirteenth century connect to that church and the churchyard. The new church was constructed in the early part of the 1300s.

The new church was extremely large for the small village which housed it. However, it is highly possible that a chapel stood in the village and may have been associated with nearby St Mary's Reculver (see links) prior to the construction of the existing structure. The tower seems to have been added about 1350. It has distinctive alternate bands of flint and Kentish ragstone at its base. The church has a beautiful interior: preserved rather than modernised.

The Catholic Church of St John Fisher & St Thomas More, Herne, lies on the eastern side of Canterbury Road, inside the triangle formed by that, Albion Lane, and Park Place, and almost abutting the latter. The site is effectively the last plot on the southern edge of the village of Herne. The church was built by Wesleyans who, in 1887, opened what may have been Herne Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. It probably closed after the war and was later taken by  Catholics.

All photos on this page by P L Kessler.