Upnor Castle is not nowadays a strong place, but the long stretch of foreshore between it and the waterside, down-river, is occupied by great naval powder-magazines, and a pier for the Government light railway running at the rear is a feature. The castle has a certain picturesqueness, and is worth sketching; but the sketcher, selecting the best view-point by the riverside, is soon made aware that he has become an object of interest to the Metropolitan Police on watch within, and presently finds himself plied with amiable inquiries; these being times when espionage is very much to the front.
UPNOR CASTLE.
The inquisitive stranger having thus attracted the attention of the police, and having—let us hope—duly satisfied them, may now make his way up the steep street again, and, reaching the cross-roads, soon come into Frindsbury. From this village, with its hill-top church, whose spire is a prominent landmark, a descent is immediately made into the tramway-infested streets and congested areas of Strood; and from Strood the Medway is at once crossed, into Rochester.
CHAPTER IV
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 decidedly 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 industrial 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 the water. The strenuous past, and a much more strenuous present, lend imagination, as well as pictorial quality, to the scene.