Lenham War Memorial

The Lenham War Memorial is one of the most striking hillside memorials in Kent. Rather than a stone cross in the village square, the memorial takes the form of a huge chalk cross cut into the North Downs escarpment above the village, visible for miles across the Weald. It was created in 1922 in memory of the 42 men of Lenham who died in the First World War, and further names were added after the Second World War.

The cross measures roughly 58 metres long and 24 metres wide, and is maintained by regular cleaning of the exposed chalk. Below the cross, a small enclosure contains a stone memorial listing the names of the fallen. The site can be reached on foot from the village via a signposted path climbing up through fields onto the downs, and offers wide views back across Lenham and the Kent Downs.

In the village itself, The Square holds the more conventional village war memorial, a stone cross that sits at the heart of Lenham's medieval marketplace. Together the two sites give a sense of how a small Kent community chose to remember its losses on an unusually grand scale.