Titan Jewellery

Where it began

The story starts in 1972, when Geoff Kewell founded the Jewellery Workshop at 48 Gabriel’s Hill, Maidstone, Kent. For many local customers, that address became simply part of the map of the town. People knew the street, knew the shopfront, and knew that work was being carried out there by people who understood jewellery from the bench upwards.

When Jason joined the business in 1994, he stepped into an established Maidstone workshop with its own rhythm and reputation. That mattered. A long-running premises teaches you things that cannot be picked up from a catalogue or an office desk. Day after day, year after year, you see what customers bring in, what they ask for, what they wear every day, and what details really matter once a piece has left the counter and gone back out into ordinary life.

In 2009, Jason became a partner in the business. By that point, the workshop in Maidstone was not just a place he worked in, but a place he had helped shape over many years. The business continues to trade independently, and its own identity remains tied to Gabriel’s Hill.

For us, that history matters because Titan Jewellery did not appear out of nowhere. It developed alongside the working life of the Maidstone premises, with the same hands-on background behind it.

Gabriel’s Hill and the Maidstone premises

48 Gabriel’s Hill stood in a Georgian listed building in the Maidstone town centre conservation area, only feet from the River Len. That setting gave the premises a character that was very different from a modern retail unit or business park office. The building itself was part of the feel of the place, and the surrounding streets carried far more than ordinary shopping history.

Gabriel’s Hill was also tied to one of the most violent moments in Maidstone’s past. On 1 June 1648, during the Second English Civil War, Royalist supporters in Kent rose against Parliament. A force of around 2,000 to 3,000 men gathered in Maidstone, and Parliament responded by sending troops under Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander of the New Model Army.

By the time Fairfax’s forces reached the town and attacked in the evening, Gabriel’s Hill was one of the main streets leading into the centre from the north. The Royalists had barricaded streets, occupied houses and taken positions in upper floors, firing down on the soldiers advancing below. The fighting was not confined to an open field on the edge of town. It moved through buildings and along streets, house to house and room to room.

That is what makes the location of 48 Gabriel’s Hill so striking. The street where the building stood lay on part of the route where some of the heaviest fighting took place. Most customers coming through the door were thinking about repairs, commissions or collections, not the Civil War. Even so, the site carried that older story under its everyday use. It was a working jeweller’s address in modern Maidstone, but it also stood on ground shaped by a battle that tore through the town itself.

Titan Jewellery at Gabriel’s Hill

Titan Jewellery operated from the upper levels of the same Gabriel’s Hill building. That practical link between the two businesses is the main reason this page exists. Anyone trying to work out the connection between the Maidstone workshop and Titan Jewellery is tracing a real shared history, not a loose association.

Working from the upper floors of a listed building in a conservation area gave Titan Jewellery an unusual base. It was central, old, close to the River Len, and closely tied to the older fabric of Maidstone rather than being set apart from it. The surroundings did not feel generic, and neither did the work being done there.

During those years, Titan Jewellery developed its own specialism in alternative metal wedding rings and sterling silver jewellery. Because that work grew out of a real workshop background, the business naturally centred on materials and designs that people wanted for long-term wear, including titanium rings, tungsten rings, cobalt rings and selected lines of silver jewellery. The Maidstone premises gave us continuity, while the Titan side of the business gradually took on its own direction.

So although Titan Jewellery and the Maidstone workshop were separate businesses, they shared the same building and part of the same working history. For customers who remember visiting Gabriel’s Hill, that is the connection.

The move to Rochester

In 2024, Titan Jewellery relocated from Maidstone to the Innovation Centre Medway at Rochester Airport. That move marked the point at which Titan Jewellery stopped being based at Gabriel’s Hill, even though the connection with the old premises remains part of our story.

A year later, in 2025, Jason sold his stake in the Maidstone business so he could concentrate fully on running Titan Jewellery’s workshop. That decision made the separation clear in practical terms as well as legal ones. The original workshop continued independently in Maidstone, while Titan Jewellery moved forward from its new base in Rochester.

For old customers, this is the point that matters most. Titan Jewellery is no longer located in Maidstone, and customers will not now find us at Gabriel’s Hill.

That change was not a break with the past so much as a narrowing of focus. After many years connected with Gabriel’s Hill, the work of Titan Jewellery had grown enough to need its own dedicated base.

Innovation Centre Medway

Our current premises are at the Innovation Centre Medway, located at Rochester Airport in Kent. The centre opened in 2009 and was developed by Medway Council as part of a wider regeneration plan for the airport area. With around 30,000 sq ft of office space and flexible leases, it was designed as a business and technology hub for smaller companies.

That setting is very different from Gabriel’s Hill. Instead of upper floors in a listed town-centre building, we now work from a site planned around modern small business use, with other growing firms around us and room for specialist workshop activity to develop in a more focused way.

The Innovation Centre also played an early part in what became the wider Innovation Park Medway development. Its location was chosen in part because of the presence of established high-tech employers nearby, including the BAE Systems Rochester campus. In other words, the site was selected not just as spare land, but as part of a wider working environment built around engineering, technology and small business growth.

There is another layer to it as well. The Innovation Centre stands very close to where Short Brothers’ aircraft factory once stood. That gives the Rochester base its own local setting, just as Gabriel’s Hill did in Maidstone, though the history here belongs to aviation rather than the Civil War.

Rochester Airport and Short Brothers

Rochester Airport developed directly from the early aircraft factory of Short Brothers, one of the oldest aircraft manufacturers in the world. The company was founded in 1908 by Eustace, Oswald and Horace Short. They produced aircraft under licence from the Wright brothers’ designs, and in 1909 established Britain’s first aircraft production line.

In 1913, Short Brothers moved their main works to Rochester on the River Medway. The location offered access to water for seaplane testing, large open land, and good proximity to London and naval facilities. At Rochester they built both a factory and a flying field, tying aircraft manufacture and operation closely together on the same site.

Short Brothers became particularly known for seaplanes and flying boats. In the 1930s, they built the Short Empire flying boats for Imperial Airways, aircraft that helped connect Britain with Africa, India and Australia. That work placed Rochester into much bigger transport and engineering networks than the local landscape alone might suggest.

During the Second World War, the site took on even greater importance. Short Brothers produced the Short Stirling there, the first four-engine heavy bomber used by the RAF, and the type was designed and developed at Rochester. Because the factory mattered strategically, the surrounding area became a target for German bombing.

After the war, aircraft manufacturing shifted to larger facilities and Short Brothers moved most operations away from Rochester. Today the airport operates as a general aviation airfield, with flying schools, private aircraft and aviation engineering businesses. So although Titan Jewellery’s work has nothing to do with aircraft manufacture, our present base sits within a place shaped by an important chapter of British aviation.

Where to find us now

Titan Jewellery is now based at the Innovation Centre Medway at Rochester Airport. The airport sits on the boundary between Rochester and Chatham, so our postal address falls within Chatham, Kent.

If you knew us through the Maidstone workshop at 48 Gabriel’s Hill, the connection is real, but the location has changed. We are no longer based in Maidstone, and we no longer operate from the upper floors of the Gabriel’s Hill building.

Our work now continues from the Rochester Airport site, where we focus on Titan Jewellery full time. That includes alternative metal wedding rings, selected silver wedding rings, and specialist ranges such as Damascus steel rings, zirconium rings and tantalum rings.