THE QUARRIES
Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and fronts on to the Thames. The road, all the way hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high walls with tall factory-chimneys on either side; or passes between long rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage-fields in the last stage of agricultural exhaustion. Docks; huge and ancient chalk-pits; great tanks of lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere about, for Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and have been for many years, the chief places of a great export trade in flints, chalk, and lime. The flints are sent into Derbyshire, and even to China, where they are used in the making of porcelain; and many thousands of tons are shipped annually. The excavation of chalk and flints during so long a period has left its mark—a very deep and ineffaceable mark, too—upon this part of the road, and, to a stranger, the appearance presented by the scarred and deeply quarried countryside is wild and wonderful. Spaces of many acres have been quarried to a depth, in some places, of over a hundred and fifty feet, and many of these great pits have been abandoned for centuries, accumulating in that time a large and luxuriant growth of trees and bushes. Others are still being extended, and present a busy scene with men in white duck, corduroy, or canvas working clothes cutting away the chalk or loading it into the long lines of trucks that run on tramways down to the water’s edge. Not the least remarkable things in these busy places are the great bluffs of chalk left islanded amid the deepest quarries, and reaching to the original level of the land. They rise abruptly from the quarry floors, are generally quite inaccessible, and have been left thus by the quarrymen, as containing an inferior quality of chalk, mixed with sand and gravel, which is not worth their while to remove.
In midst of scenery of this description, and surrounded by shops and modern houses, stands Northfleet Church, beside the highway. It is a large Gothic building of the Decorated period, and has been much patched and repaired at different times without having been actually “restored.” There are some mildly interesting brasses in the chancel; but the massive western embattled tower is of greatest interest to the student of other times, for it was built, like many of the church towers in the Welsh marches and along the Scots borders, chiefly as a means of defence. The enemies who were thus to be guarded against at Northfleet were firstly Saxon pirates, then the fierce and faithless Danes, and (much later) the French. This defensible tower at Northfleet was largely rebuilt in 1628, but a part of it belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and it even retains fragments of an earlier building, contemporary with the terrible Sea-rovers who sailed up the estuary of the Thames, burning and destroying everything as they passed.
A significant sign of the quasi-military uses of this extremely interesting tower is the tall stone external staircase that runs up its northern face from the churchyard to the first-floor level. The small doorway that opens at the head of this staircase into the first floor was originally the only entrance to the tower, and before the church could be finally taken the enemy would have had to storm these stairs, exposed to a fire of cloth-yard shafts from arrow-slits, and of heavy stones cast down upon them from the roof.
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Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in ship-building. Here, too, were “Rosherville Gardens,” or shortly, “Rosherville.” A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has been sold to an oil company.
Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens. It was so far back as the 1830’s that he conceived the grand idea of building a new town between Northfleet and Gravesend, on an estate he owned here, beside the Thames. The idea remained an idea only, for although a pier was built and the Gardens formed, Rosher never lived to see his “ville,” in the sense of being a town. But his Gardens were a hugely-compensating success. It is not given to many to make a success of a hole (unless the hole is a mine), and the site of that celebrated Cockney resort was, and is, nothing else; being in fact one of the oldest and largest of the chalk-quarries, excavated to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet in some parts.
WATERCRESS
There a curious kind of rusticity was tempered with an equally curious urban flavour; there the succulent shrimp and the modest watercress (“Tea ninepence; srimps and watercreases, one shilling”), were supplemented romantically by the strains of husky bands. There art was represented by broken-nosed plaster statues of Ceres and a variety of other heathen goddesses, some supporting gas-lamps in sawdusty bars and restaurants; others gracing lawns and flower-beds. To those who delighted in plaster statues grown decrepit and minus a leg or an arm, like so many neo-classic Chelsea pensioners, Rosherville was ideal.