Kent Police was inundated with hundreds of calls about the earthquake, which seismologists recorded as being one and a half miles off the east Kent coast, in between Ramsgate and Sandwich, at 2.52am.
It was Britain's biggest earthquake since a 5.2-magnitude tremor struck in Market Rasen, Lincs, on Feb 27, 2008.
More than 800 "felt reports" were received by the British Geological Survey (BGS), mainly from residents in Ramsgate and Margate. But the BGS said reports were also received from as far afield as Norwich, North Walsham and Cromer in East Anglia. One man said he believed he felt the tremors across the Channel in Normandy.
One resident said they thought their hotel door was being kicked in, another described their house creaking, while a third said the tremor sounded like a "heavy object rolling over the roof".
Susan Fry, who lives in Ramsgate, said she heard a "strange rumbling sound".
"We were woken up by the house shaking for about 10 seconds," she told The Daily Telegraph. "There was a strange rumbling sound. The vibrations felt like being on cruise ship when it comes on to port sideways."
Barry Hunt said he was woken by a "short graunching shudder" in Faversham, about 25 miles inland from the quake. "It felt like someone had slammed a sticking door very hard," he added. In Ramsgate, 42-year-old Muni Prasad was among the locals who reported being jolted from their beds in the middle of the night. "We were woken up suddenly," he said. "For a few seconds the property was moving. In my daughter's room, books had fallen down."
Bob Fludgate said: "I was woken up in the early hours as if a lorry had hit the house. I'm quite a deep sleeper, too."
And Sarah Luddington said: "I was in bed and I went downstairs because I thought something had smashed into the house, like a car or something.
"It was awful but there was no damage. I could feel everything shaking. Everyone else was asleep. It was scary." Kent has been at the centre of tremors before. In April 2007, a magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit Folkestone, causing cracked walls and fallen chimneys.
Experts said earthquakes similar in size to yesterday's happen around every two years in the UK and about 4,500 times a year across the world.
Experts said it was difficult to link the latest Kent earthquake to a specific fault line. David Galloway, a seismologist with the BGS, said: "The whole of the UK is criss-crossed by thousands of fault lines but most of them are at depth.
"This means we do not pinpoint a specific earthquake to a specific fault because even if a location is a few hundred metres off it could have been a completely different fault.
"Fortunately, we do not live on the plate edges - for example, the San Andreas fault in California can actually be seen at the surface, but the faults in the UK are blind and most earthquakes happen at a depth of between 5km [three miles] and 25km."
The BGS warned there "could be more tremors" following the quake, which it described as "quite significant".
But a spokesman told BBC Radio Kent: "Most of the energy could have been released in this one earthquake and the next one might not be for another three, four, five or 10 years. We can't predict."
