Places to Stay in Faversham
Faversham makes an excellent base, whether you are here for a weekend of history and good food or using the town as a launch pad for the wider Kent coast and countryside. Accommodation here is, true to form, mostly independent and full of character: historic coaching inns with rooms above the bar, characterful bed and breakfasts in listed townhouses, creekside boltholes and a scattering of self-catering cottages, rather than a strip of identikit chain hotels. Staying over means you can enjoy the town the way locals do, with an evening pint in a four-hundred-year-old pub and a slow market morning before the day-trippers arrive.
The most characterful rooms are often above the pubs, which makes perfect sense in the home of Shepherd Neame, Britain's oldest brewer. The Sun Inn on West Street is the best-known example, a fourteenth-century inn in the very heart of the conservation area, a step from the Guildhall and the Market Place, offering boutique bedrooms, some with roll-top baths, above a busy bar and kitchen. Several of the town's other historic inns also let rooms, so you can wake up surrounded by timber beams and sloping floors with breakfast waiting downstairs. For food-led stays, the town's tradition of inns and restaurants with rooms means you are rarely far from somewhere you can eat very well without needing to drive afterwards.
Bed and breakfasts add another layer of choice, many of them in handsome period houses within easy walking distance of the centre, and there are creekside options too for those who want to wake up near the water around Standard Quay, with its moored barges and antique warehouses. Out towards the edges of town and the surrounding villages you will find farm stays, shepherd's huts and self-catering cottages set among the orchards and marshes, ideal for families, walkers or anyone wanting a quieter, rural base while staying within reach of the town's pubs and restaurants.
Location is one of Faversham's quiet strengths. The town sits right on the main rail line, with fast and regular services to London as well as high-speed connections, which makes it a realistic weekend escape without a car and an easy stop on a longer Kent trip. From here you are within a short hop of Canterbury, the seaside at Whitstable and Herne Bay, the Swale's birdwatching marshes and the orchards of the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale. Walkers can pick up the creekside and coastal paths almost from the doorstep.
Worth planning around are the town's big dates. Rooms get snapped up well in advance for the Hop Festival on the first weekend of September, the town's largest event, and demand also rises around market weekends, transport events and the summer season generally, so book early if your visit is fixed to a particular date. Because so much of the accommodation is small and independent, midweek and off-season stays can be both better value and easier to secure, and you will often deal directly with the owners.
Whatever style of stay you are after, a historic inn in the thick of it, a peaceful creekside B&B, or a rural cottage among the orchards, Faversham offers the kind of characterful, locally run places that make a trip memorable. Use the listings below to compare rooms, locations and prices, and find a base that lets you enjoy one of Kent's most rewarding old towns at its own gentle pace.