In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Dunton Green, one stop beyond Knockholt on the Sevenoaks line, a disparate village at the foot of the North Downs three miles into Kent. Nothing in what I'm about to write is likely to make you want to come here, but I can see why those who live here do.
You can tell a lot about a village from its sign. This is Dunton Green's, a double sided number on the village green erected to commemorate the centenary of the parish in 2008. We have a train steaming out of a tunnel towards a miner. We have some kind of clocktower beside some kind of hall. We have ducks on a river, this being one of the upper reaches of the Darent. And we have men stacking tiles behind a kiln that looks like a beehive. You might have expected to see the parish church, St John the Divine, except this became surplus to requirements in 1987 and is currently occupied by the local veterinary practice. You'll hear more about the rest as this narrative continues.
Dunton Green exists because it lies on the main road between London and Sevenoaks, a milestone placing it three miles from the latter. The main street is thus called London Road and all the older buildings can be found strung out along its length with more modern infill to either side. The oldest would appear to be Donnington Manor, a totally Tudor confection with 15th century roots, although apparently it was mostly assembled in 1936 from shipped-in beams and feature windows as was the fashion at the time. Other jarring notes include the marble elephant out front and the pig-ugly 1970s hotel bolted onto the back, but if you want to visit an escape room or host a wedding there's nowhere else in the village to go. A proper Georgian villa can be found behind, namely Broughton House, now a private home accessed down a 700m-long beech-lined driveway.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Dunton Green is that it has two motorways running through it. One of these is the M25 which skirts the northern tip, and the other is the M26, a much more brutal presence which carves beneath the middle of London Road and essentially divides the village in two. So intrusive was its arrival that the former parish church is on one side of the motorway and the vicarage on the other. Annoyingly for residents it's not possible to drive onto the M26 anywhere nearby, despite the Chevening interchange being just across the fields, because restricted movements mean access is only for eastbound traffic already on the M25. Westbound is even worse, the 18 miles from Wrotham (M26) to Godstone (M25) being the UK's longest motorway journey between exits, should that ever come up in a pub quiz. A better M25-related fact is that the electronic group Orbital - the Chime-tastic Hartnoll brothers - grew up righthere in Dunton Green.
North of the motorway lie the aforementioned manor, the aforementioned ex-church and a long string of cottages, plus a cosy roadside pub called the Rose and Crown. If you've ever walked the North Downs Way this is the only side of the village you'll have seen, a lowly nucleus, before ploughing on across the fields to Otford. But things pick up somewhat on the other side of the tarmac chasm with a more concentrated run of modest houses and also the village hall, formerly a National School. The clocktower alongside is the village's somewhat kitsch war memorial, where the tally balances out at WW1 27 WW2 22. It is at least a little friendlier than the commemorative garden squished along the verge (Private Property, may be used by members of the public, no liability is accepted by the owner, we hope you enjoy our garden).
The next transport link to disturb Dunton Green was the railway, an 1860s shortcut through the chalk of the North Downs to speed up connections to Hastings and Sevenoaks. This required digging the Polhill tunnel, a four year task, during which time the navvies set up camp in the village or moved into 'temporary' cottages kickstarting residential development. A few years later Dunton Green became the starting point of the brief Westerhambranch line, long underused and eventually closed in 1961 even before Beeching wielded his axe. Today Dunton Green is a lowly halt devoid of all former station buildings through which much faster services often hurtle, now with two stand-alone validators waiting to be uncovered when the long delayed Project Oval finally debuts. It's not somewhere to linger.
The station does have one intriguing feature however, which is a long pedestrian subway carved through the embankment which was once needed to burrow beneath the branch line that no longer exists. You reach it by crossing the village recreation ground and striking out across an unexpected meadow, then bearing off towards an arched portal leading to a distant set of steps. I'm not sure I'd want to try it after dark, even though it's lit, so would probably plump for the more convoluted route via Station Approach. Sadly they didn't keep the former trackbed as a footpath, although the former railway bridge on the main street is now used as a subway by children attending the neighbouring primary school.
The village's largest employer used to be the Dunton Green Brick, Tile & Pottery Works, purveyors of bricks, squints, pressed nibbed tiles and chimneypots, which was founded by a local merchant to take advantage of the arrival of the railway. It somehow remained in business until 1956 when its clay pits were exhausted, after which West Kent Cold Storage took over, then in 2009 Berkeley Homes snapped up the site because it was right beside the station and wasn't Green Belt. Today it's the Ryewood estate, home to around a third of Dunton Green's population squished into densely-packed streets interspersed with occasional gushing fountains. Alas only residents have access to the adjacent fenced-off private woodland, unless anyone here knows the PIN code for the gate and wants to share it.
Appropriately the largest business in the village shopping parade today is a tile showroom, although their specialism is more the grey, taupe and white that cover many a local en-suite. The busiest by day must be Bojangles coffee shop and by night probably either Hei's chippie or the two Indians, one a sitdown restaurant and one a takeaway. My favourite is definitely A. W. Services whose window display includes nailbrushes, radiator caps, lawnmower pullcords and a dozen colourful teapots, and whose sign is so old it claims the shop's telephone number is still 23.
Other village treats include two further pubs, the splendidly weatherboarded Duke's Head (a former coaching inn) and The Miners Arms (named after those tunnelling navvies). Alternatively the Dunton Green Social Club flings open its doors at 7pm nightly, with Comedy Night on Friday, the Rockerfellas playing live on Saturday and bingo every Sunday. It all still feels very much like a village, if one that's grown organically with the addition all kinds of housing over the years, a proper residential mishmash. But as soon as you cross the Darent at the foot of London Road everything flips to irrevocably urban, this the Sevenoaks suburb of Riverhead with its bustling roundabout, giant Tesco and dozens of buses a day rather than just four. The young river is an unexpectedly rigid dividing line.
The river also feeds the Sevenoaks Nature Reserve, 170 acres of flooded gravel pits which lie just to the east of Dunton Green but tantalisingly out of reach. I had to walk for almost half an hour to reach the visitor centre at the entrance, eschewing the birding gear and hot chocolates for a yomp between the lakes. Crossing back over the sylvan Darent I disturbed a majestic heron from its lakeside perch, twice, then settled inside the Willow Hide to watch over the Snipe Bog Lake. Several ducks splashed their way across the water, two swans floated in serene isolation and somewhere just beyond the treeline the good folk of the Ryewood estate ordered pizza and watched their screens. It's proper varied is DG.
