Wheelers OysterBar

Richard 'Leggy' Wheeler, a dredgerman turned master mariner, opened the oyster bar in 1856, and the pink-and-blue front on Whitstable High Street has been serving them ever since — the last survivor, the house notes, of the old Wheelers name that once spread across London. Delia Fitt owns it today, having inherited it from her parents, with her partner Mark Stubbs running a kitchen that bakes its own bread and grows its own produce, and the tiny room's tables remain among the hardest-won seats on the Kent coast. A hundred and seventy years of molluscs, one family lineage at a time; the town's whole reputation walked in through this door.