The Whitstable Times is the weekly newspaper of Whitstable. Established in 1863 and first printed in 1864, it has become the forum and the voice of the community providing an on the spot account of the people and times of the town throughout many generations of change.

Thousands of editions are archived on microfilm accessible at the library. These provide a fascinating insight into the economic and cultural growth of the town as influenced by national and international events.

Today our ‘Times’ is still based in the town and is now part of Kent Regional Newspapers, which in turn is part of the Trinity Mirror newspaper group, giving the paper the resources of the largest newspaper publishers in the U.K.

OysterTown.net will not normally publish any major story about the town before it has appeared in the ‘Times’, nor will we plagiarise their copy. Apart from the fact that we just don’t have the resources to emulate the paper the reasons for this are more than just copyright issues:

1. The ‘Times’ staff are dedicated professionals who have built up the contacts and sources to get to the bottom of any breaking news.

2. Over the years the ‘Times’ has proved itself to be the most reliable source of information and pictures about the town and it’s people. It has been there every week for them with over 7,200 issues, excepting some weeks during WW2 due to bombing or supply problems.

3. We believe very strongly in the ongoing strength of this commitment to our townspeople.

There has been no index made of the Whitstable Times. Here at OysterTown.net as we use information from old copies of the paper we are building a database of items covered in each issue to start an index that will be of use to all, including genealogists, local historians and the newspaper itself. This will be a long term project, but in the meantime the fact that information recorded on this site is searchable means that the job has begun already.

Primarily the data we are interested in are births, marriages and deaths, stories about local people and anything that links with other pages on the site. Every now and again we will use general information from one issue to log, at that moment of time, what was going on in the town along with prices, adverts and gossip to re-kindle the atmosphere of the town in that period of its history.