How Airbnb swallowed Whitstable. There are 555 vacation rentals, compared to just eight apartments available for rent

The seaside town of Whitstable has never looked so beautiful, at least on the outside.

Drab Victorian terraces where local fishermen once lived have been spruced up with a fresh coat of paint, chic glossy coats of Farrow & Ball olive green and duck egg blue, pink and yellow on the front doors.

The houses no longer just have street numbers, but now have plaques with names such as Anchor, Sardine and Lobster Cottage.

There is also a key box the size of a large matchbox, fitted to the outside of each front door, with keys accessed by entering a four-digit code.

Resident Peggy Harper, 78, shakes her head as she looks out across Waterloo Road at these houses behind High Street.

The manager of the retired care home says: ‘Those lockers indicate a holiday rental.

‘Outsiders come down and tear down all our houses to rent them out to other outsiders for holidays – and leave the keys in these boxes for them to pick up.

“It’s fueled by greed. Unfortunately it is pricing the locals out of this beautiful city.”

These observations are backed by hard facts: 555 holiday properties in the city are listed on the online platform Airbnb, but there are only eight long-term rental properties available, according to Rightmove.

Peggy has lived in Whitstable for 40 years and is proud of the community she shares as a volunteer at Waterloo Center. It offers the dwindling number of locals a place to meet and chat over a cup of tea.

There is an ‘All Welcome’ sign on the door. Friend and fellow volunteer Jan Marshall is concerned about the way a wave of ‘Down From London’ (DFL) investors has driven long-term rental and owner-occupied residents out of the city in recent years.

The price of houses has almost tripled in a decade as demand has soared from investors buying up properties to rent to holidaymakers.

The 69-year-old retired store manager said: ‘Ten years ago I bought a two-bedroom house around the corner for £137,000.

‘Now that demand has increased, caused by a flood of outside money, my house is worth perhaps £400,000.

Unfortunately, this means that locals are priced out of the market. Even shopping for basic groceries is becoming too expensive as tourists want more luxury goods and meals that are much more expensive.”

The city of 30,000 inhabitants is held together by a maze of side streets, each with their own story.

A few yards away is Squeeze Gut Alley, apparently named as a route where boys would hide from an overweight police officer.

Another nearby street lined with holiday homes is Cushing’s Walk, near where actor Peter Cushing, who starred in the Hammer studio house of horror films, once lived.

Others, Albert Street and Gladstone Road, give a nod to the Victorian era when holidaymakers first arrived.

Whitstable was put on the tourist map by Julius Caesar when he invaded in 55 and 54 BC. Falling in love with the ‘Royal Whitstable Native Oyster’, which thrived in the plankton-rich waters, he shipped bucket loads filled with fresh water back to Rome.

But it wasn’t until the late 18th century that the news got out to London’s upper classes – who made the trip not just to sample oysters, but also because it gave ladies the opportunity to try out newfangled bathing machines.

Key boxes on the doors of cottages in Whitstable indicate they are being used as Airbnb properties

These were wheeled onto the beach in the 1760s as a healthy way of bathing, away from peeping toms hoping to catch a glimpse of a bare ankle.

Now in the grip of a new wave of gentrification, this once thriving fishing port and tourist spot faces a bleak future, where after the rush of tourists in the summer it becomes a ghost town in the winter when they disappear.

There are more than twenty fishing huts on the harbor side.

Many of these have already been converted into holiday lets, charging £75 to £200 or more per night for an ‘authentic’ experience, typically accommodating four people.

You can also opt for a two-bedroom Airbnb cottage, which typically costs £1,000 for four nights, including cleaning and service charges.

Cooper’s Catch is the only real fishing hut open on the sunny afternoon of our visit. It is run by Roger Cooper, 77, and his sons Ben, 45, and Robert, 38.

They went fishing for whelks at 2am and returned 11 hours later, bagged with 14 bags of 30kg each.

Roger calculates that this freight is worth £580 (excluding any fees).

He believes they can make more money renting out a luxury Airbnb without even having to get out of bed – but prefers to support the community with a seafaring way of life that his grandfather pioneered in the 1860s. began.

The fishermen can only catch local native oysters between September and April and sell them for 85 cents each.

At other times, Rock Oysters are imported for tourists from places such as Jersey.

Ben says: ‘No wonder holiday rentals are taking over the city as industries like ours struggle to survive.

‘I used to rent my house here, but my wife and I bought a two-storey starter home in nearby Faversham in 2010 for £140,000.

‘Five years later we bought a four-bedroom house for £220,000 because we had three children at the time.

‘If I were buying for the first time now I wouldn’t be able to buy in Whitstable or the surrounding area.

‘Unfortunately, local residents have been priced out of the city and this means it is difficult to find people to work here.’

A four-bedroom Victorian family home in Whitstable costs around £700,000, while you can pay £1.3 million for a similar-sized detached house with beach views.

Looming over the harbor is a giant aggregate factory, nicknamed ‘the cockle dredger’, which collects aggregate from the seabed to be turned into sand and gravel for road paving.

In stark contrast, right across from this gated industrial building is an upscale Lobster Shack restaurant with blue and white striped lounge chairs out front and within the chatter of the DFL crowd.

Here, locals serve tourists lobster thermidor for £59.50, which goes well with a £150 bottle of Moet & Chandon Rose champagne.

The pressure of the tourist takeover is also being felt on the High Street.

The banks have disappeared because visitors prefer to spend money by waving their plastic rather than banknotes and coins.

The closed NatWest is now a Round the Clock restaurant and cocktail bar, while Lloyds Bank remains boarded up after closing last year.

George’s Whitstable Stores on the other side of the road was founded in 1969 by the current owner’s grandfather, Lucy Eason, 42.

The cheerful married mother of two is keen to adapt to changes in the city – but admits the arrival of national chains such as Costa Coffee a few doors down to cater for the needs of tourists and others is pushing up rental prices as they have deeper pockets.

It makes it harder for traditional stores like hers to survive.

She says: ‘We love this community but now need to diversify to survive, such as offering DIY supplies to locals at the back of the store, while putting more luxury goods in the front window to to attract the new crop of tourists, such as a £39 metal octopus wine holder.

Our £4 crab nets are still one of the biggest sellers for now.”

Delia Fitt, 81, owner of the pink-fronted Wheelers Oyster Bar, with a picture of an oyster tray on the outside wall, is keen to show off photos of Whitstable’s proud bygone era.

This includes images of the world’s first steam-powered passenger train service from the harbor to Canterbury, opened in 1830.

Known as the Crab and Winkle line, it closed in 1951.

Whitstable is also the birthplace of scuba diving.

Brothers Charles and John Deane developed a firefighting idea in 1829 using a fireman’s helmet and an attached hose to create a diving helmet.

Delia says: ‘Traditionally, Whitstable was a working town that thrived on innovation, but tourists have now discovered us. We are victims of our own success – with trains and roads connecting us to London, the journey taking just over an hour.

‘Once word got out about our delicious seafood, there was no stopping the tourists.

But the point is that money taken from holiday rentals can be pocketed by outsiders and not invested in the city. We need tough new rules that require more long-term rentals.”

The Wheelers takeaway menu, which includes £5 pots of cockles, £7 dressed crab and a dozen ‘Rocky’ oysters for £23, offers surprisingly good value for money.

However, Delia fears that the influx of tourists and the invasion of holiday homes and Airbnbs will only continue to drive up prices, leaving the famous seafood out of the pockets of locals.