Today the words ‘beer’ and ‘ale’ are often used interchangeably but historically they are not the same beverage. Until the 13th century the predominant drink of Northern Europe and for all classes was spiced ale, brewed with malt. Brewed on a domestic scale, ale was cloudy, sweet and nutritious, but did not keep and did not travel well without spoiling. The addition of an extra ingredient into ale – the hop – not only changed the taste, making it bitter, it helped to preserve the concoction much longer and stabilised it. By 1400 this new flavoursome drink, beer, was being made on a commercial scale abroad and being imported into England. It seems that skilled Flemings and the Dutch made the good-quality beer, but that some London brewers were attempting to brew hop beer (though not always successfully).

By the late Tudor period very large tracts of farmland in Kent had been successfully converted into hop gardens, the Kentish soil being peculiarly suited to the cultivation of hops. Early manuals tell us that what a hop farm also required was plenty of combustibles (initially wood later charcoal) needed to fire the kilns which would dry the hops, as well as designated areas of land dedicated to the growth of ash or alder wood which would be used for the supporting hoppoles. The cost of setting up a new hop garden was considerable, particularly as the farmer needed to employ a large labour force to harvest the hops in his hop fields during the short picking season. However, many of the Kent farmers could apparently afford the high initial outlay and, with good husbandry, were able apparently to make their fortune.

Initially the harvesting of the hop was done by a local workforce – later supplemented by workers from outside the area. The picking ‘season’ in Kent started in early September and the harvesting could continue over a sixweek period. Rain was a disaster as no money could be earned and the crop lost. From the beginning, farmers encouraged married women to be an important part of the labour force, permitting them to bring their children into the fields and to help with the picking.

In the 17th century, hop cultivation in Kent had become so widespread and commercial and beer production had become so successful that the new breweries were supplying overseas markets as well as local ones. And although hops were now grown in 13 other counties, it was Kent that supplied one-third of all hop crops.

The 18th century has a prolific amount of literary material on hopping which relates to the fact that beer had now firmly replaced ale in England as the most general drink for all classes and that the crop was now therefore both important economically and lucrative for the farmer; it also tells us that many farmers were literate and could afford to buy printed books on farm management. By the end of the century thousands of acres of farmland in Kent were dedicated to hop production, creating a distinctive landscape of fields in which lines of geometrically placed high poles sustained growing or trailing bines, the whole protected by windbreaks of trees and dotted by picturesque oast houses which housed the kilns to dry the hops.

In the Victorian period, journalists observed and wrote magazine articles about the Kentish hop gardens and their pickers for an interested middleclass public and these, as well as hopping songs and poems, give us an insight today into how the harvesting of the hop generated its own rituals and superstitions during this period. From Tudor times onwards hopping had a special language partly derived from its specialised tools including the ‘hop dog’, the ‘hop peddler’ and the ‘hop spud’. In addition to this the red neckerchiefs adopted by the men gave them a jaunty European look and the exotic stilts worn by the Kentish men as they took giant strides through the hop garden must have generated some excitement, as did the arrival of the gaily painted Gypsy caravans in the early period. In the first half of the century the late Georgian and then the Victorian conscience was pricked by accounts of the yearly mass exodus by thousands of London’s poorest “in a ragged procession” as they made their way often on foot along the Old Kent Road to the hop fields of Kent. The union workhouses could supply some with overnight accommodation en route but there was little else provided for them when they arrived and it was often unhygienic, with farmers often proffering accommodation normally reserved for their animals – stables, cattle sheds, barns, even pigsties – to house the hopping families. Washing and toilet facilities were equally primitive at this time. Eventually farmers were inspired to provide shelter for them under canvas and eventually purpose-built huts.

Machine picking began to displace hand picking during the 1950s and by the 1960s the workforce was simply no longer needed. And so, not with a bang but a whimper, ended the great exodus of East Enders from London to the hop fields along with the Gypsy and Irish ‘tinkers’ that joined them. The landscape itself changed as the hop fields and their hop poles disappeared one by one leaving oast houses isolated in the midst of great empty green fields.