It was not until I started school at Wombwell Hall
when I was thirteen that I consciously realised how charmed I was by houses. The fact that real people, living breathing
individuals had actually slept, ate, read books, wrote letters and had hopes
and dreams the same as me – and added to all that, had actually lived in that
wonderful old house was thrilling and always half felt as if someone with a
great imagination was making it all up specifically to fool me. I actively looked forward to each school day
for the next three years!
I realised by the time I was five years old that the
terrace cottages in York Road, where we lived in Northfleet could not have been
described as elegant; not that I knew that word at the time. I must have been half aware of the street’s
deficiencies for more than a year or two because whenever we visited Aunt Mag
in her semi-detached Council house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, I never failed
to be immediately approving of the bathroom, firmly inside the house. My Aunt’s family were never reduced to
donning raincoats in stormy weather simply in order to pee with a modicum of
comfort. I knew better than to discuss
this in too much detail with my mother because although she professed that she
certainly didn’t envy her sister for her upscale living conditions, she frequently commented to me on the bus
going home that the lav could certainly do with seeing the occasional splash of
bleach. I had little idea what bleach
was but a reasonable understanding of what she meant. However, despite the
inadequacies of my aunt’s cleaning I enjoyed the visits we made to Crayford and
admired the house and those of the neighbours not just for the bathrooms but
for the splashes of stained and coloured glass that in those days were still
largely intact in the windows and doors of these interwar homes. Mostly these were glass diamonds adorning
bay windows but there were also occasional and exciting re-creations of
archetypal sunrise motifs on the upper lights of front doors.
On afternoon walks with my mother and her good friend
Grace Bennett to Lime and Robina Avenues and Laburnum Grove which were planned
and executed primarily to observe how those further up the social scale were
coping with life, I was always enthused to survey similar flashes of coloured
glass, designs of flowers, leaves and grasses, that early in the twentieth
century would have been described as New Art.
As I grew older I began to admire the houses closer to
Gravesend, those in Burch Road in particular.
Burch Road was named for Benjamin Burch who apparently built Crete Hall
down by the river. His son in law, Jeremiah
Rosher very much wanted to create an entire suburb of fine houses for those who
could afford them which I later realised would only be those we called Toffs
because they were the people who went in for buying houses rather than renting
them. For many years I was not familiar
with anyone who actually owned a house in any case so it was somewhat of a
foreign concept.
Jeremiah Rosher was said to have been influenced by
the fine homes and garden squares of West London where only the home owners had
keys to the greatly admired green spaces.
Full of enthusiasm Rosher flamboyantly engaged a
famous architect, H E Kendall and gave him full details of the dream suburb he
was intending to create which was to be called unsurprisingly, Rosherville.
Perhaps his enthusiasm waned when he began to run out of money but his plans
never came to total fruition although the impressive houses created in the early years of the
nineteenth century still stand and there is still a great deal to admire about
them.
The elderly couple who lived next door to us for some
years, Ted and Annie Bessant had a daughter called Ena of whom my mother
heartily disapproved and described as
Much Married which was a label she gave to anyone who had been through the
scandal of divorce and had remarried. Ena was a garrulous woman, much given to wild
exaggeration. She had two young
daughters with whom I was instructed to play from time to time. I didn’t care much for the daughters but I
cultivated the older one, Evalina, in the hope that I would be invited inside
the house in which they had lived since they conveniently rid themselves of their
original husband and father and replaced him with a rather successful
travelling salesman called Norman. They
now rented the lower half of a Burch Road home.
Unfortunately the house had
fallen into some disrepair but when I did manage to inveigle my way inside there
were still enough vestiges of its former grandeur remaining to stir the
imagination. The grand marble fireplace
still stood proudly in place in what had been the Drawing Room and it was clear
that the homes had been early recipients of piped water. And naturally enough I was delighted to
note that there was a proper inside bathroom on the second floor landing,
smelly and in need of much bleach though it was.
Jeremiah Rosher’s proposed suburb still stands firmly
between Gravesend and Northfleet, the Northfleet Parish boundary stone being
set into a wall on the Overcliffe just to the rear of the Pier Road
houses. One researcher into the history
of the area claims that an early owner was a jeweller who lived in a four
bedroom, two reception room home. The
kitchen was in the basement. With him
lived his wife, maiden aunt, five children and one live in servant.
Rosherville had been infamous for the popular pleasure
gardens nearby though they had long since gone by the time I was growing up. Old Nan, however, remembered them well or at
least said she did and so did Old Mrs Bessant who, unlike my grandmother, said
that they were definitely not a place you would take a Nice Girl to. Apparently the important statues that had
once been in the Gardens had been stored for safe keeping in one of the chalk
cliff caves during the war and were re-erected in 1965 outside a new block of
flats where almost immediately they were vandalised.
My mother and her sisters said they recalled well a
Rosherville pub called The Elephant’s Head that they patronised as teenagers
for reasons now forgotten but Aunt Martha said it was because their sister
Phyllis had a suiter by the name of Frank who rented a room from a Miss
Lavender who lived in a very smart house called Bycliffes demolished just
before the second world war. For good
or for bad the housing in the Rosherville area remained to the forefront of my
most desired list until I was at least twelve years old, no matter how tarnished
and smelly the toileting arrangements were.
However by the time I was heading towards my thirteenth birthday I was becoming
just a little bit in love with what was on offer on the south side of The Overcliffe. I read somewhere that the highway had been
constructed around 1800 as a turnpike road to replace the original which had
become dangerous because of the extensive chalk excavations.
The first houses there were built in about 1835 on the
north side of the road but were apparently demolished in 1953 to make way for a
car showroom. I should of course
remember this happening but I don’t. It
was originally meadowland and called Fairfield, named after the annual
Gravesend Fair. The houses on the southern
side were built between 1860 and 1870, each having a long rear garden leading
to pastureland. How I longed to
investigate the interiors of these buildings, each looking full of promise from
without. I didn’t speculate as to
whether there were inside bathrooms as I felt it certain that the residents of
such upmarket properties would demand them. Many years later in Auckland I met Jennifer
who told me she had spent the formative years of her childhood in Gravesend,
living in one of the very Overcliffe houses that I had admired so fervently. I was of course, very impressed but did not
ask any questions relating to bathrooms or toilets of any description for fear
of sounding ill mannered.
Sometimes when
Molly and I walked into Gravesend by ourselves I mentioned that it might be
exciting to live in one of the earliest Overcliffe houses those built in 1830
but she maintained that her own most favourite house was that which housed the
library at Northfleet. Nevertheless she agreed
that living in a place with so many rooms could be a liability and she feared she
might be forced to take in lodgers should she ever own it. She ventured that aiming for a smaller property
like those around the corner from us in Springhead Road would be much more
manageable and she did wonder if the library might be like biting off more than
she could chew.
When my father died and my mother started to work for
the Lovells in Darnley Road, the houses there quickly joined my list of favourites. I no longer remember the Lovells’ address
which is a pity but I do recall their impressive dining room with the vast oval
table and round back chairs upholstered in red plush. Later, as a teenager I briefly went out with
a young man who worked at The Kent Messenger and lived in one of a pair of Darnley
Road villas built in the Gothic Revival Style.
I terminated our relationship
when it was clear I wasn’t ever going to be invited inside his grandparents’
rather impressive house which I longed to examine in detail.
Anyone with an interest in domestic architecture could
not fail to be impressed by Harmer Street which along with Berkley Crescent formed
the first stage of another ambitious speculative plan this time attributed to
Brighton Architect Amon Henry Wilds who also designed the Town Hall in the High
Street. The houses date from the early
1830s and in my twenties, accompanied by my brother, I found myself inside one
of them. I don’t recall all of the
details now but the then new owner, from what was at the time called Bombay, was about to open a restaurant in the town. He showed us through his property acquisition
with pride and although there was a great deal of work to be done to upgrade
the building, it was not difficult to visualise what life within those rooms
might have been like early in the previous century. However, it was with a small shock I
realised that they may not have enjoyed the privilege of indoor plumbing –
although I examined the house as carefully as I was able, there were no signs
of a bathroom. I toyed with the idea of
asking to use the facilities but immediately abandoned this notion for fear of
being directed into the back yard. I
still hope I was mistaken about the absence of this important feature.
It was to be decades before I developed an
appreciation of those terrace cottages in York Road where my life began, said
to have been built in 1840 to house workers in local industry, chalk or cement
workers maybe. At the time such houses
were often constructed on small parcels of land that were sold off to different
builders, resulting in differing styles emerging. York Road certainly differed from Shepherd
Street and Buckingham Road.
The houses came equipped with gas lights, curved
Victorian grates in bedrooms and parlour and small closed ranges in the
kitchens. The sculleries had coppers
for heating water and washing and shallow sinks with wooden draining boards. Baths of course were portable and brought
into the scullery for the occasion. The
outside cistern lavatories that I so detested were I now realise a great
improvement upon what went before them – privies that took a variety of
forms: bog-house, pail and earth
closets. These were regularly emptied by
Nightmen which sounds horrific.
Over the years I have been able to investigate the
interiors of many differing homes in various styles in a number of places in
the world. The domestic architecture of
Gravesend still remains especially vivid in memory though!
