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Sharon Hayles, who lives in the village of Stanford near the Eurotunnel at Folkestone, said her house slid from side to side for about 10 to 15 seconds but escaped damage.

Mrs Hayles, who was sitting in her living room with her husband Martin, said: "We were looking at each other in amazement - you don't expect to feel a tremor that size here.

"It literally felt like the whole house was being slid across like a funfair ride. We did expect to see some kind of damage, because we have a quite a large house and it was shifting under our feet. It was horrible."

Hendrick van Eck, 27, who lives in Canterbury, said: "I was lying in bed and it felt as if someone had just got up from bed next to me. I then heard the sound of cracking, and it was getting heavier and heavier. It felt as if someone was at the end of my bed hopping up and down."

Richard Ashworth, Conservative MEP for the South East of England, who lives in Folkestone, said he went outside and saw a mass of people standing in the street wondering "what on earth had happened".

He described events as "dramatic" and added it as "really quite an extraordinary experience".

"At first I thought a lorry had crashed into the back of our house, but having lived in New Zealand I soon realised what it was. The entire house shook. It was quite frightening and I am astonished there is no damage to our house. Emergency services were extremely fast to respond, but it seemed they were rushing around not quite knowing where to go."

Another eyewitness, Scott Kanaway, said: "The whole ground just shook, like something you see in a film."

The Rev Sean Carter said: "The house started to shake for about 10 seconds and I had to hold on to the wall."

Lorraine Muir said chimneys had come down, gas and electricity supplies were off and people were being evacuated from their homes and were being looked after by the Salvation Army. "It's chaos up here at the moment," she said.

The mother-of-four said she was in bed when the earthquake struck. "I was very, very frightened, I'm still shaking a bit now."

A spokesman for Eurotunnel said everything was "running normally" with the Channel Tunnel, which runs close to Folkestone.

"As far as we are concerned, it has had no effect on services," he said. "We have felt the earth tremors but the system is running as per normal."

EDF Energy, which supplies electricity to people in the Dover and Folkestone area, said several thousand customers had lost power due to the earthquake.

A spokeswoman said: "Several thousand customers in the Folkestone and Dover areas of Kent experienced an interruption to power supply at 8.21am this morning. EDF Energy Networks engineers are on site and we are working to ascertain the scale of the incident and restore power supply."

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