Welcome To Local History At A Glance

I took a quick trip into Maidstone today as I'd been reading about the town's murals in our local newspaper, The Kent Messenger, which I've never actually seen before and was determined to capture at least one of them for blip purposes.
This particular example is entitled "Welcome to Maidstone" and is a collaboration between the street artist Graham Upton, who was born in the town, and local young people and school children. It's in a rather unprepossessing site that leads to the town's subterranean bus station beneath The Mall shopping centre but I was immediately struck by the fabulous blast of colour and the fantastic quality of the graphics.
It's a representation of various points in time in the town's history or art, people or literature with associations to it, from left to right these include:

Iggy the Iguanadon (he's featured in a couple of previous blips) - who actually appears on the town's coat of arms and was one of the earliest discoveries of a complete Iguanadon skeleton in the country in 1834.

Tony Hart (and Morph) - an English artist (who was at school with the artist's father) best known for his work with educating children in art through his role as a children's television presenter - fronting a series of children's art programmes, including "Vision On", "Take Hart" and "Hartbeat" which were very much part of my childhood.
He also designed the ship logo used in Blue Peter and the show's famous badges as well as the animated character Morph, who appeared beside him on his programmes following his introduction in the 1970's.

The US flag - Lawrence Washington, a distant cousin of George Washington, lived in Knightrider street in the town until his death in 1619 and his coat of arms - an eagle, three stars and two red stripes against a white background can be found at his memorial in All Saints church and would go on to form the origins of the Stars and Stripes.

007 - some of the town's street names appear in Ian Fleming's Moonraker novel as the book's villain, Hugo Drax, chases James Bond through them.

The English Civil War - a large battle in this conflict took place in the town in 1648.

Book depictions - the author Jack London, who would go on to write "The Call Of The Wild", recounts his visit to Maidstone in one of his earlier novels, 1903's "The People Of The Abyss" and Charles Dicken's "The Pickwick Papers" has references to Muggleton (based on the town) and Dingely Dell (the real life Cobtree Manor Park just outside the town).

It was another stroke of luck that the chap in this shot just strolled past as I was taking my picture and took a glance at the imagery of this rather  incredible sweep of local history!