ROCHESTER AND CHATHAM—BROMPTON—GILLINGHAM—GRANGE—OTTERHAM QUAY—LOWER HALSTOW—IWADE
Very little change overtakes Rochester High Street, that narrow, rather gloomy, and distinctly dirty-looking thoroughfare. The Corn Exchange clock still projects its “moon face” over the pavement, as Dickens described it, “out of a grave, red building, as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign”; and the ancient grime still clings to the brickwork houses, and the occasional old weatherboarded tenements still lack the new coats of paint cruelly denied them. One might expend much description upon the High Street of Rochester, from the famous “Bull” hotel of Pickwickian fame, and the tame, characterless front of the “Seven Poor Travellers,” on to the curiously weatherboarded Westgate of the Cathedral Close, familiarly known, through associations with “Edwin Drood,” as “Jasper’s Gateway,” and not forgetting the Early English crypt beneath the “George” inn, nearly opposite the “Bull,” a relic of which very few people know, and little to be suspected from the decidedly58 commonplace general appearance of that house. There is, indeed, room for a most interesting monograph upon this High Street. I always associate the little weatherboarded house and shop numbered 195, on the left hand as you go towards Chatham, with that where little David Copperfield had his adventure with the half-mad second-hand-clothes shopkeeper who said “Goroo, goroo,” and invoked his lungs and liver. It is a bootshop nowadays; but you go down into it from the street-level just as in the story.
Eastbury House—the “Nuns’ House” of “Edwin Drood”—until recent years a gloomy mansion, mysteriously retired behind a grim brick wall, has lately been restored and the enclosing wall demolished, and has become a museum. It is now a much more worshipful-looking building than before; all the better for its scouring and cleaning, and yet looking none the less antique. Built in 1591, Eastgate House looks every year of its age, and has a very thorough air of historical mystery, although nothing has ever happened there to which one can put a name. Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies, in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” must often have experienced strange thrills and shivers in its darkling rooms and passages.
The allied towns of Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, and New Brompton do not grow any more attractive, from the tourist’s point of view, with the effluxion of time. They had always a taint of Cockney vulgarity which later industrial59 and military and naval developments, and an extensive system of electric tramways, have intensified. With all these things, the natural beauties of the site have been almost utterly obscured in mean streets and crowded slums. Those beauties were of a very striking nature. From the lofty side of Chatham Hill the eye ranged over the broad Medway and its marshes, beautiful in the distance, and across to the Hundred of Hoo. To-day that view is qualified by a vista of innumerable roofs and domestic chimneys, and by the many giant chimney-stacks of the Portland cement factories that have to-day become almost as striking a feature of the surroundings as the naval and military establishments, and spread a smoky haze over the scene.
It is not easy to realise Chatham as a waterside place, still less as a port and dockyard, because of the closely-packed houses along the High Street which runs parallel with the Medway. Only the narrowest alleys open to the water, and few of them: the Sun Pier being, in fact, the only view-point. But the outlook upon the busy waterside scenes up-river, along Limehouse Reach, is of an inspiring nature. It is composed, indeed, of widely different elements, but is therefore all the more pictorial. There you see Rochester Castle and Cathedral, contrasting strongly with the huge coal-cranes and the wharves, alongside with the fuming chimneys of the cement factories on the Frindsbury shore, and many picturesque, brown-sailed barges and fussy steam-tugs on the60 water. The strenuous past, and a much more strenuous present, lend imagination, as well as pictorial quality, to the scene.
The name of Limehouse Reach is exactly descriptive, for the cement factories on the Frindsbury shore give it a character. Here, and above Rochester Bridge, the pleasant Medway valley is scarred and seamed with the chalk-quarrying and the mud-dredging that go towards the making of Portland cement, this neighbourhood being one of the chief centres of that industry. The chalk and the river-mud are mixed roughly in the proportion of three parts of chalk to one of mud, and are then burnt in kilns and ground into a flour-like powder. Portland cement, invented about 1826, is an important industry, with an output of over 3,000,000 tons a year in this country. The price per cask was originally 21s., but the output is now so large and the production has so improved that a better article is now sold at about 4s. a cask.
As to Chatham Dockyard, it is a highly historic place full of keenest interest to a patriotic Briton, but to such a good deal more difficult to explore properly than it is made for distinguished foreigners. Why the native tax-payer who contributes to the support of this establishment so much of his hardly-earned gold should be thus discouraged, while possible enemies—much more keenly concerned to worm out official secrets and far better able to do so—should be shown every particular is more than the plain man can comprehend.62 But it is the same tale in all our places of arms.
Very little change overtakes Rochester High Street, that narrow, rather gloomy, and distinctly dirty-looking thoroughfare. The Corn Exchange clock still projects its “moon face” over the pavement, as Dickens described it, “out of a grave, red building, as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign”; and the ancient grime still clings to the brickwork houses, and the occasional old weatherboarded tenements still lack the new coats of paint cruelly denied them. One might expend much description upon the High Street of Rochester, from the famous “Bull” hotel of Pickwickian fame, and the tame, characterless front of the “Seven Poor Travellers,” on to the curiously weatherboarded Westgate of the Cathedral Close, familiarly known, through associations with “Edwin Drood,” as “Jasper’s Gateway,” and not forgetting the Early English crypt beneath the “George” inn, nearly opposite the “Bull,” a relic of which very few people know, and little to be suspected from the decidedly58 commonplace general appearance of that house. There is, indeed, room for a most interesting monograph upon this High Street. I always associate the little weatherboarded house and shop numbered 195, on the left hand as you go towards Chatham, with that where little David Copperfield had his adventure with the half-mad second-hand-clothes shopkeeper who said “Goroo, goroo,” and invoked his lungs and liver. It is a bootshop nowadays; but you go down into it from the street-level just as in the story.
Eastbury House—the “Nuns’ House” of “Edwin Drood”—until recent years a gloomy mansion, mysteriously retired behind a grim brick wall, has lately been restored and the enclosing wall demolished, and has become a museum. It is now a much more worshipful-looking building than before; all the better for its scouring and cleaning, and yet looking none the less antique. Built in 1591, Eastgate House looks every year of its age, and has a very thorough air of historical mystery, although nothing has ever happened there to which one can put a name. Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies, in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” must often have experienced strange thrills and shivers in its darkling rooms and passages.
The allied towns of Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, and New Brompton do not grow any more attractive, from the tourist’s point of view, with the effluxion of time. They had always a taint of Cockney vulgarity which later industrial59 and military and naval developments, and an extensive system of electric tramways, have intensified. With all these things, the natural beauties of the site have been almost utterly obscured in mean streets and crowded slums. Those beauties were of a very striking nature. From the lofty side of Chatham Hill the eye ranged over the broad Medway and its marshes, beautiful in the distance, and across to the Hundred of Hoo. To-day that view is qualified by a vista of innumerable roofs and domestic chimneys, and by the many giant chimney-stacks of the Portland cement factories that have to-day become almost as striking a feature of the surroundings as the naval and military establishments, and spread a smoky haze over the scene.
It is not easy to realise Chatham as a waterside place, still less as a port and dockyard, because of the closely-packed houses along the High Street which runs parallel with the Medway. Only the narrowest alleys open to the water, and few of them: the Sun Pier being, in fact, the only view-point. But the outlook upon the busy waterside scenes up-river, along Limehouse Reach, is of an inspiring nature. It is composed, indeed, of widely different elements, but is therefore all the more pictorial. There you see Rochester Castle and Cathedral, contrasting strongly with the huge coal-cranes and the wharves, alongside with the fuming chimneys of the cement factories on the Frindsbury shore, and many picturesque, brown-sailed barges and fussy steam-tugs on the60 water. The strenuous past, and a much more strenuous present, lend imagination, as well as pictorial quality, to the scene.
The name of Limehouse Reach is exactly descriptive, for the cement factories on the Frindsbury shore give it a character. Here, and above Rochester Bridge, the pleasant Medway valley is scarred and seamed with the chalk-quarrying and the mud-dredging that go towards the making of Portland cement, this neighbourhood being one of the chief centres of that industry. The chalk and the river-mud are mixed roughly in the proportion of three parts of chalk to one of mud, and are then burnt in kilns and ground into a flour-like powder. Portland cement, invented about 1826, is an important industry, with an output of over 3,000,000 tons a year in this country. The price per cask was originally 21s., but the output is now so large and the production has so improved that a better article is now sold at about 4s. a cask.
As to Chatham Dockyard, it is a highly historic place full of keenest interest to a patriotic Briton, but to such a good deal more difficult to explore properly than it is made for distinguished foreigners. Why the native tax-payer who contributes to the support of this establishment so much of his hardly-earned gold should be thus discouraged, while possible enemies—much more keenly concerned to worm out official secrets and far better able to do so—should be shown every particular is more than the plain man can comprehend.62 But it is the same tale in all our places of arms.
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