18 Best Museums In Kent

The Historic Dockyard Chatham, comfortably. The site is large, with ships, buildings and enough separate elements that a family gets through a long day there without repeating anything, and it works across a wide age range. Royal Engineers Museum is the next tier down in scale but dense with things to look at. The smaller town museums are an hour or two well spent rather than a whole day, and are best paired with something else nearby.

Then steer towards the houses and the local collections. Chartwell Home of Churchill and Ightham Mote are both properties with grounds, where the interest lies in a building and a garden rather than machinery, and The Seaside Museum Herne Bay offers a small, local, seaside-flavoured collection that asks less of a visitor. Kent's transport and military sites are the strongest part of the category, but they are not the whole of it.

On their own, rarely; as part of a day, often. A small local museum is usually one or two rooms with a devoted volunteer somewhere in it, and it will hold a child for a shorter stretch than you might hope. The way to use them is to pair one with a beach, a park or lunch in the same town. Elham Valley Railway Museum and Dover Transport Museum both fit that pattern, being specific enough to be memorable and small enough not to sprawl.

Almost entirely. The indoor marker covers every one of the eighteen, with outdoor space on six of them, usually grounds, a yard or something too large to fit inside a building. That combination is the best of both, giving you somewhere to go when it rains and somewhere to let a child run when it stops. If your day depends on staying dry, this is the category to open first in Kent.