Maidstone East railway station to platform 1 shows the alignment of a former bay platform. A third track runs as a passing track through the station between the up and down lines. A pedestrian walkway on the railway bridge provides a route to the Medway Valley Line's Maidstone Barracks station on the west of the river. Maidstone's third station, Maidstone West, is south of Maidstone Barracks. There have been plans to redevelop the station for a number of years. In 2005 Network Rail announced that they were in talks with the John Lewis Partnership who intended to build a large Waitrose supermarket on the
Maidstone the Hermitage Millennium Amphitheatre. Maidstone is mentioned several times in Ian Fleming's 1955 James Bond novel, "Moonraker". Villain Hugo Drax passes through King Street and Gabriels Hill and later stops at the Thomas Wyatt Hotel. Writer Jack London recounts his visit to Maidstone in his 1903 book "The People of the Abyss". Whilst living in the slums of London in the summer of 1902, he heads to Maidstone in search of hop-picking work up the London Road. He finds lodgings with a "Sea Wife" living in the poor quarter of Maidstone, and persuades her and her husband to let him