Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘Canterbury should be new County Town’
Sorry Maidstone, you’ve had a good run, but it’s time to face the inevitable: you should be stripped of the title county town and the last vestiges of your civic life packed off to Canterbury, writes columnist Rhys Griffiths...
There, I said it. Many think it, I am convinced, but few are brave enough to stick their head above the parapet to make the case proudly and unambiguously. The time has come to admit our forefathers got things badly wrong and correct their grave error at the earliest opportunity. The process has already begun. Kent Police has decamped from its long-standing HQ in Sutton Road for new digs in Northfleet, the Army is set to quit Invicta Park Barracks before the decade is out, and Kent County Council - surely this tale’s ravens in the Tower - is even considering vacating County Hall. We’re approaching the point where the title of county town traditionally the administrative centre and beating heart of local government - ceases to have any real meaning.
Now is the time to get out in front of this sorrowful story of gradual decline and make a decisive step towards a glorious new future in Canterbury, which by any reasonable measure has always been the true capital of our proud county.
How could the Victorians have got it so wrong in the first place, to consider Maidstone remotely superior to the jewel in the Kentish crown? What made this century-and-a-bit aberration possible?
The decision to anoint Maidstone
‘Now is the time to get out in front of this sorrowful story of gradual decline and make a decisive step towards a glorious new future in Canterbury...’
county town came about as the culmination of a process of incremental accumulation of various functions of civic society.
When county councils were first established in England under the Local Government Act of 1889, Maidstone was already home to the police constabulary, a prison, an Army garrison and the Kent County Lunatic Asylum. Local politicians would have felt perfectly at home.
This isn’t to say Canterbury wasn’t in the running. How could she not be? Stronghold of the pre-roman kingdom of the Cantii, wellspring of Christianity in these islands, later home to not one but two Spoons pubs - her claim is as strong as any town in the county.
Yet romance and history were cast aside. The brute force of bureaucratic reality won the day and Maidstone was made our county town. A sorry situation that endures to this day. We’ve recounted the institutions which gave the town on the banks of the Medway the edge back in the days when Victoria was ensconced on a throne which ruled swathes of the globe, so let’s take a measure of where we sit at the beginning of the new Carolean age. Canterbury - Kent’s only city, thanks to administrative bungling in the breakaway republic of Medway - is home to two universities, its Cathedral is the mother church of the global Anglican communion, the Marlowe is the county’s largest theatre, and our county cricket club calls the St Lawrence ground home.
If Kent County Council were to do the right thing and relocate then the deal would be sealed. The city of the Cantii would once again, rightfully, stand pre-eminent in Kent, all would be good in the kingdom once more.
Just don’t get me started on why East Kent and the Men of Kent should secede entirely - that’s a column for another day…
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