Hinterland

Why those snobs who dismiss north Kent as a charmless dump need to hit the road to Rochester

The sniffy attitude some people take towards north Kent disappoints me. The Medway towns are seen as down-at-heel and lacking charm, which is nonsense. The area is steeped in history from Roman times; there is the old naval dockyard at Chatham, and fine churches in some of the outlying villages. However, the real jewel is the ensemble of the cathedral and castle in Rochester, where the Medway is first bridged. Seen from the viaduct south of the town that carries the M2 over the river, it is a handsome vista, but a short drive from the suburban sprawl of south-east London.

There has been a cathedral at Rochester since 604, founded by a fellow missionary of St Augustine. The present building dates from the late 11th century, a couple of decades after the Conquest. The Conqueror gave the bishopric to his half-brother Odo, whose incompetence soon made a dilapidated building derelict. But it was Rochester’s good fortune that Odo’s replacement was Gundulf, a Norman monk, who was also an experienced engineer and architect. Gundulf ’s nave and quire were finished by about 1140, only to suffer from three successive fires, one of which wrecked the two transepts.

A rebuilding began around 1190 and continued until the middle of the 13th century. There were new transepts, a lengthened nave and a reinforced tower. Inside the nave there is a fine exhibition of

Norman work: big, compounded round columns topped by scalloped capitals, holding up great rounded arches decorated with chevrons and nailheads. But the true splendour of the early medieval work confronts the visitor as he or she reaches the West Door, with its finely carved decorations within its great arch – five ranks of early 12th century ornaments, both foliage and animals, surrounding a fine tympanum over the door itself of Christ in Majesty, with smaller representations of the apostles around him. It is a remarkable survival of craftsmanship from

900 years ago, and a vivid incarnation of life and faith from our distant past. Towards the east end the architectural style changes into Early English, and some of the major windows – notably that over the West Door – are Perpendicular, revealing a programme of renovation that lasted throughout the medieval period.

When money poured into the diocese in the 1870s, shortly after Charles Dickens, a celebrated local resident, had died, and with the flourishing of the nearby naval dockyard, George Gilbert Scott undertook a largely sympathetic restoration of the cathedral’s interior: but the impression one gets from the exterior, with the blind arcading on the West Front, the squat tower and the decorations on the towers either side of the West Front, is of a Norman building, well preserved.

The castle, which faces the cathedral across two sections of greensward interrupted by a cobbled street, is no less fine a

If the cathedral gives us clues to medieval faith, the castle offers a lesson in warfare

spectacle. John Newman, in his Pevsner guide to West Kent, writes that “the cathedral seems to shelter under the castle” because the keep is so mighty – and is set on a mound – and the cathedral, for all its architectural merit, is squat by comparison. An earlier, rudimentary castle had been besieged in the power struggles after the Conqueror’s death in

1087. It was Bishop Gundulf, his reputation as an engineer preceding him, who was asked to expand and fortify the castle once William Rufus had established himself as king. Gundulf also had a hand in reinforcing Colchester Castle and building the White Tower in the Tower of London.

Rochester’s great square keep was finished by the mid-1130s, and further strengthened after King John besieged it at the time of Magna Carta; John destroyed one of the four square corner towers, which was replaced with a circular one. What is preserved now is one of the finest such sites in the country. Just as the cathedral gives us a strong sense of medieval faith, the castle conveys a clear idea of the practicalities of medieval warfare; though the greatest advantage the otherwise gutted keep provides today is a fine view of the cathedral from the top. Those who question whether one can experience history just from visiting buildings plainly need to take a trip to Rochester.