Most of the interesting stuff on the Isle of Thanet is around the coast, but Quex Park lurks inland. It's roughly southwest of Margate, following the A28. It's a mile's easy walk from Birchington station (although almost everybody drives, because this is Kent). It's a historic house with an extraordinary museum, plus gardens, craft shops and a host of bolted-on leisure activities. And it starts with a Q, which ought to be a decent enough reason to drop in all by itself.
Walk far enough past the front gates and you'll find a map depicting all the potential elements of your 'Quexperience', most of which can be visited for nothing. It's a pretty map, and there's clearly a lot to see, but using it to find my way around proved surprisingly difficult. Indeed I was reasonably pleased with my visit until I got home, started researching this post and realised I'd missed an important chunk out.
Quex House is why this place exists, its peculiar name courtesy of the Quekes family, a 16th century dynasty of Kentish woollen merchants. Monarchs William and Mary used to stay overnight at Quex when popping across to their ancestral homelands if bad weather prevented their ship from sailing, and that's as good as it gets for history. The current house is 200 years old and bewilderingly ornate, or at least the five rooms you're allowed to see are. The Oriental Drawing Room is the most impressive, with its lacquered cabinets, intricately carved chairs and papier mâché ceiling. Plan ahead and try not to come on a day when a wedding's booked.
The real attraction is the Powell-Cotton Museum, the life's work of Major Percy Powell-Cotton, a hunter, explorer and conservationist (assuming those roles aren't mutually exclusive). Between 1887 and 1939 he went on two dozen lengthy expeditions across Africa and Asia, ticking off all kinds of different ecosystems, and sent back thousands of specimens for stuffing. At Quex he built several galleries to display his finds, including wallfulls of horned heads and huge illuminated dioramas. Whatever you think of his ethics, they are amazing.
The largest room has monkeys at one end, giraffes and zebras to the left and elephants to the right. Scattered inbetween are all kinds of indigenous hoofed animals, including addax, bongo, hyrax and other creatures I'd never heard of, all smarter-looking than your average taxidermy patient. Two other large galleries are animal-led, while others focus on art and artefacts and meticulous ethnography. A century before the internet this would have been a truly eye-opening educational collection, and even 21st century scholars still visit to make notes. I'd pitch it somewhere between the Horniman and the Pitt-Rivers, both of which started out in a similar way.
The third thing your entrance fee pays for, on top of the house and the museum, is the gardens. I never found the gardens, nor did I find a sign directing me there, nor was the map much help, nor did anybody nudge me in that direction. I now think I should have turned left at the ticket desk and the hidden seven acres were probably up a side passage, but now is too late. The other thing I completely failed to find is the spire-topped Waterloo Tower, a folly celebrating its bicentenary this year (and a mildly famous Blake's 7 filming location). The tower's equipped with a full set of bells, which I heard pealing out across the estate, but is concealed by a ring of trees and there's no public access and I've been left with a sense of not seeing half what I went for.
I did find the alpacas. Quex Park has a large herd you can go trekking with, although it turns out this means wandering round paths and roads on site trailing one on a lead. There's also a craft village, a garden centre, a crazy golf course, softplay, laser combat, paintball, a big bouncy inflatable and a large barn decked out like a farmers market (where I finally found some gypsy tarts and BestMate is going to be so chuffed). Essentially Quex Park has set itself up as Thanet's all-encompassing go-to family attraction, and the state of the car parks suggested they're successful in meeting that target. It may just take more than one visit to find everything.
