The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

CANTERBURY

The entrance to Canterbury from London is one of the most impressive approaches to a city to be found in all England. The traveller passes through the suburb of Saint Dunstan, by the old parish church that holds the severed head of Sir Thomas More, coming into the city through a street of ancient houses and under the postern arch of West Gate. The great drum towers of West Gate mark the ancient limits of the mediæval city, and guard an opening in the city wall which stood on the further side of the little river Stour. A drawbridge effectually prevented the entrance of an enemy, and when the strongly-guarded gate was closed at nightfall, belated citizens had to stay outside and put up with the inconvenience as best they could, in company with such travellers and pilgrims as arrived late from too much storytelling, feasting, or praying, on the road. For the accommodation of these travellers the suburbs of Saint Dunstan and West Gate arose early without the walls of the city, and several inns—the “Star” and the “Falstaff” among them—remain to show how considerable was the belated company entertained here.

West Gate, as we now see it, is the successor of a much earlier gate, and was built by the ill-fated Simon of Sudbury. It is the only one remaining of all the seven gates of the city, and owes its preservation rather to its convenience as a prison for poor debtors, than to any love our eighteenth-century barbarians had for mediæval architecture. It is to-day a police-station, and thus carries on the frugal and utilitarian traditions which originally spared it in the destruction of much else of beauty and interest.

Ancient buildings are carefully preserved nowadays. Why? Can we flatter ourselves that the provincial mind is more enlightened? I am afraid not, and must sorrowfully come to the conclusion that the ignorant authorities of our country towns would be as ready as ever to demolish their old monuments, did not their natural shrewdness teach them that, as strangers come from all quarters of the world to view their historical remains, they must be regarded in the light of a valuable asset. So far, they are undoubtedly right. Let them “restore” and tear down the remaining gates and towers and castles in the provincial towns of England, and they will prove, in the scarcity of visitors that will follow on their Vandalism, how valuable, in more senses than one, are the ancient ways.

Canterbury has seen a great deal of this senseless disregard for antiquity. Six gates, as I have said, were wantonly destroyed, but the passion for destruction did not stop here. The remains of the Norman castle were years ago converted into a coal-hole of the local gasworks, and are still put to that degradation; great stretches of the city walls, with their watchtowers, were taken down for corn-mills to be built with their materials; and, worse than all, stupidity of this kind ran riot among the Dean and Chapter in the thirties. For seven hundred and fifty years had Lanfranc’s north-western tower of the Cathedral stood, while the south-western had been rebuilt nearly three hundred years before. This dissimilarity vexed those assembled holders of fat prebends and decanal loaves and fishes, who drank port and read The Times, and had not a single sensible idea in their meagre brainpans, beyond a notion that one thing ought to match with another, and that as every Jack should have his Jill, so also should everything else possess a pendant. How truly British!

WESTGATE, CANTERBURY.

Well, if these western towers did not match, they must be made to; and so to find an excuse for pulling down the older one. There is always some graceless modern architect, with palm itching for five-per-cent. commissions, who would undertake or advise anything to procure a job, and the Dean and Chapter found such a man, who conceived Lanfranc’s work to have gone beyond repair. To this creature, Charles Austin, their own diocesan architect, who should have been earnest to preserve, rather than to destroy, they gave instructions for the pulling down of the Norman work and for its replacement by an exact copy of the Perpendicular tower. The thing was done in 1832. So little beyond repair and so sturdily strong was that Norman tower, that it was necessary to blow it up with gunpowder. A German invading Goth and malignant destroyer could do no more.

The work of demolition and the building of the new tower was done at a cost of £25,000. The architect pocketed £1,250 as commission, and all who care for architecture have lost one of the very few Norman Cathedral towers known in England. But then, how exactly those towers match, and how satisfied must be all good people who would sacrifice everything for the sake of uniformity!