| Gift Shop
The gift shop is located with in the bottom floor of the Oast House and offers a wide range of affordable gifts, toys, produce, food and beverages, souvenirs, postcards, books and more to suit all ages and interests.
Explore this fascinating Kentish iconic building which includes a traditional general store, cobblers shop, apple and hop harvest displays as well as our working coal-fired kiln.
The Oast house has a fantastic view of our beautiful pond, which is home to our noisy Goose Gordan and his loyal Girlfriends as well as our very own ducks. During the Spring you may even see some wild ones! To find out more about the animals on the pond please click here.
History of the Oast House
Our Oast House is the last traditional working oast in Britian, as well as being the only one made of ragstone (a traditional Kentish building material).
At our annual Maidstone's Original Beer & Hop Picking Festival, in the height of the hop picking season, the hops are taken directly from the hop garden to the Oast house, where our 'Friends of the Museum' work night and day to dry them on the floor above the kiln, a task requiring much skill and judgement. The furnaces in the kilns are fuelled with wood from local coppices and manage to produce a steady flow of hot air. Once dry, after about eight hours, the hops are then laid out on the floor of the cooling room, before being tightly packed into giant sacks called 'pockets', ready for storage and their journey to a brewery.
Hops are now dried by other methods that are less labour-intensive, but during the our annual festival we show off this much loved tradition and invite you all to come along and give hop-picking a go.
The General Store
Most of the fittings and contents of the general Store were taken from a shop in the Village of Hawkhurst on the Kent/Sussex border. Piper's Stores opened for business on the 5th May 1897 and was run by three generations of the same family. It started life as a grocer's and draper's store but later sold hardware and haberdashery at various times. The shop closed in 1986 - after 89 years of trading and many of the fittings and 500 artefacts were donated to the Museum. A representation of the store was then constructed by Museum staff in 2000 in the Oast House and appropriate artefacts spanning the 20th century are now displayed.
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