Newnham is a village and civil parish in the Syndale valley in Kent, England, in the administrative borough of Swale near the medieval market town of Faversham.

[2] Though Newnham has changed enormously over the past 250 years, it retains the feel of an archetypal southern English village, though few farmworkers still live there.

Fast railway connections to London and the continent of Europe add to the appeal with jobs in Ashford, Canterbury, Maidstone and Medway within easy reach after the completion of the M20, M2, M26 and M25 between the mid-1960s and early 1990s.

Two pub-restaurants remain: opposite the church is the George Inn, which is now no longer mainly a drinking house for locals but instead attracts families and groups of businesspeople for meals.

Above the field stands the 12th-century manor house, Champion Court, still an apple farm, though employing few people now and an abundance of modern science, overlooking the valley.

There is also a collection of infilled recently built houses squeezed into former orchards and fields that abutted The Street and which provided the only late 20th-century development land (which has to be within the "village envelope" according to planning restrictions).

The valley road was a highway in Norman times, linking the Roman Watling Street (Dover and Canterbury to London, the A2) to the Pilgrims' Way on the other side of the downs.

A 2010 excavation established that a full-scale Roman road passed along the valley though its precise route remains to be confirmed; it has been explored only near the Watling Street (A2) Syndale junction and at the foot of Newnham's "hilly field".

Broadband internet access, mobile phone connection and satellite television signals are becoming more prevalent especially with demand from home-workers and children whereas mains water and gas supplies are well-established.