Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Popular places where we used to meet
When I posted one of the above photos on the Facebook group Canterbury, Remembering It As It Was, I received a bigger reaction than to any of the images I had posted before.
These pictures date from a quiet Sunday during January 1991 when the last trader in the shops around St George’s Clocktower had just moved out and the windows had been boarded up.
Within months, these shops would be demolished and a fascinating archaeological dig began that would tell us much about the medieval church of St George’s and its crowded graveyard. The first clocktower development was completed in 1955, at the same time that the extensive restoration on the old church clocktower was finished.
The original scheme included a sunken rose garden, at medieval ground level, that was arranged around the tower on its north side.
As can be seen from the pictures, this sunken garden was surrounded by a low perimeter wall. And, as I was to discover from my original posting, this perimeter wall was very fondly remembered by a number of Canterbury teenage generations as a popular meeting point, particularly at weekends.
“Meet me at the clock tower” meant meet me on the wall round the sunken garden.
The other popular meeting points during the 1970s and 1980s were the long benches at the much missed modernist Longmarket, and the lobby in the early 1970s Whitefriars shopping scheme where the escalators ran up and down.
Sadly, all of these meeting points have now been consigned to history.