Town in Kent, England

Rochester

Dickens's favourite Kent town has a Norman castle, a cathedral founded in 604 and a May Day parade of chimney sweeps in top hats.

Key information

County: Kent
Nation: England
Known for: Rochester Castle, Rochester Cathedral, Charles Dickens, the Sweeps Festival
Famous people: Charles Dickens (local childhood and later life), John Fisher, Richard Watts

About Rochester

The siege that was won with pig fat

In the autumn of 1215, King John laid siege to Rochester Castle, held against him by rebel barons in the dispute that followed Magna Carta. His engineers dug a tunnel under a corner of the great tower and propped it with timber. Then John sent for the fat of forty of his fattest pigs. The fat was packed in and set alight, the props burned and the corner of the tower collapsed. The defenders retreated behind the keep's dividing wall and held on until hunger forced them out. The keep is still the tallest in England at about 35 metres. Look at the corners and you can spot the repair: the rebuilt tower is round, where the other three are square.

A cathedral older than almost everything

Rochester Cathedral was founded in 604, when Justus was made the first bishop. That makes it the second-oldest in England after Canterbury, and Rochester one of the oldest bishoprics in the country. The man who shaped the Norman town was Gundulf, bishop from 1077. He is credited with building the first stone castle here and the White Tower in London. His tower still stands beside the cathedral. The cathedral's treasure is the Textus Roffensis, a manuscript compiled in the early 1100s. It is the only source for the laws of Æthelberht of Kent, written around 600 and the earliest laws in English. Inside the building there are also remarkable medieval wall paintings, including a Wheel of Fortune. The cathedral's bishop John Fisher became one of Henry VIII's most famous victims. He was executed in 1535 for refusing to accept the king as head of the Church.

Dickens's town, in print and in life

Charles Dickens moved to nearby Chatham aged five and never forgot the area. Rochester turns up in the Pickwick Papers, where the Bull Inn and the castle appear, and in Great Expectations, where the decaying Satis House is drawn from a Rochester house. In his unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the town becomes Cloisterham. He bought Gad's Hill Place, just outside the town, and died there on 9 June 1870. He had hoped to be buried at Rochester, but the nation had other ideas and he went to Westminster Abbey. Today, the High Street's old buildings and Eastgate House make it easy to see why he kept coming back. Dickens-themed festivals bring the characters out in costume each year.

Why sweeps dance through the High Street

On May Day weekend, Rochester fills with morris dancers, musicians and chimney sweeps in top hats and sooty faces. The Sweeps Festival, revived in 1981, has roots in the old May Day customs of the sweeps, who traditionally took the day off and paraded through town. The star is Jack in the Green, a figure covered entirely in leaves, who is awakened at dawn on 1 May on Blue Bell Hill and then takes part in the festival processions through Rochester. It is wonderfully odd and very Kentish. It is also a real community occasion, with dancers from all over the country joining local sides.

Bridge, river and flying boats

Rochester sits where Watling Street crossed the River Medway, and the Romans built a bridge and a fort here. The medieval stone bridge that replaced it was completed in 1391 with support from Sir John de Cobham and Sir Robert Knolles. The Rochester Bridge Trust, established in 1399 to maintain it, still exists. The river later brought engineering. In 1913 Short Brothers, pioneers of British aircraft building, acquired land on the Medway at Rochester, and the new factory opened in 1914. The firm built flying boats here, including the Empire boats of the 1930s and the Sunderland patrol aircraft of the Second World War. Richard Watts, an Elizabethan benefactor, left money in 1579 for a charity house that gave six poor travellers a night's lodging. Dickens wrote a Christmas story about it, The Seven Poor Travellers, and the building still stands on the High Street.