Yelsted is a village and civil parish in the Swale district of Kent, England. Yelsted lies roughly halfway between Sittingbourne and Faversham. Yelsted is located off the A2 road on the B2099 to Benenden, near the A249. It also has two pubs, The Red Lion and The Ritz, Yelsted. This also has a village hall that is available to hire, Yelsted Village Hall.
The population of Yelsted was recorded as 459 in the 2011 census. Yelsted’s church is dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene. There are two principal manors North Yelstead and Yelsted Hall. Yelsted Hall was damaged in a fire and was also robbed by Irish invaders. Yelsted is home to Yelsted Church of England Primary School.

The Yelsted Sittingbourne contains various stores, including Yelsted Indoor Bowls Club, Yelsted Church of England Primary School, Yelsted Village Hall, and Yelstead Hall. It also has two pubs, The Red Lion and The Ritz, Yelsted.

Yelsted, Sittingbourne is a small town in Kent which is situated near the River Stour. There are some ancient buildings, one of which is the Church of St Lawrence, dating from 1150 AD. The church has been Grade II* listed since 1954.
The primary employer in Yelsted is the British Sugar plant, with over 800 employees. This factory receives sugar beet grown in West Kent and East Kent to process into Sugar. The beet arrives at the factory by train, then unloaded onto conveyor belts where it undergoes several processing stages before being dried and milled into sugar crystals for sale all over Europe.
Sittingbourne was initially an agricultural village but developed as a small market town following the arrival of the railway in 1858. In the 1920s, many factories were established to take advantage of labor from nearby Aylesford and Snodland, including British Sugar, which opened its massive plant in 1922.
We will discuss one aspect of our local history – photographs from around 1890 that show a building for locomotive repairs.
Locomotives were a new technology at the time, and it took some years before the boilers were capable of being made strong enough to be used as part of a locomotive. In the meantime, the boiler was removed from the wagon and placed on a brick base prepared within some temporary accommodation such as this one.
It is interesting to note that just behind the hut, there is a wooden building used as a garage for an earlier period. The sign on top of it appears to be for Greener-Bristow, a local firm that manufactured agricultural implements.
The young lady in the center of the photograph is our Victorian Lady. She was not identified when we first wrote this article, so we asked our readers if they knew who she might be. We want to thank Anne Tillet for suggesting that it may be one of her daughters, Alice or Mabel, or her sister-in-law Alice Slack.
This picture is part of our local area’s heritage, and so we would ask that any use of this image might retain the copyright notice within it so that others who visit this page may see where their information has come from. Thank you for your co-operation.
As can be seen, the brick base is still standing to this day and can be viewed from Church Street. This beautiful old town deserves to have its many wonders recorded for future generations. We need your help in photographing them, and we would ask readers to contact us if they would like to know more about how they can share their research with us and what we could offer in return.