Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Soldiers set off on their journey to Egypt
The first of our pictures shows a busy scene in Sturry Road during September 1908.
A band leads the soldiers of the 7th Dragoon Guards away from the Infantry Barracks, right, and towards the city.
They would then be boarding trains at Canterbury West Station, on the first leg of their long journey to Egypt.
A group of civilian onlookers are grouped around the junction for New Town Street, where some of the families of soldiers stationed at the barracks were housed. The huge barracks complex mostly disappeared in the late 1960s, to be replaced by the Brymore Housing Estate. Photographic records of the many buildings lost are rare, to say the least.
Facing onto Sturry Road itself, the Waterloo Tavern is visible and advertises itself to passing trade.
And moving on to 1965, the pub can be more clearly seen in the second picture, which is part of Edward Wilmot’s Canterbury pub survey of that year. The pub building dates from the same 1840s development as the houses of New Town Street mentioned above, as well as those next to the pub itself.
The Waterloo Tavern was once a popular haunt of the soldiers stationed at the extensive barracks opposite.
In fact, although the soldiers and barracks are long gone, the pub remains open. On my last survey of the area for the book Canterbury Suburbs and Surroundings, it had fallen victim to the recent trend for changing pub names and was called the Run of the Mill, presumably with reference to the nearby Barton Mill. It has since slightly changed again and is now the Mill.