Dickens’s Rochester
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Thanks to the popularity of Bleak House and other Dickens dramatisations, the historic and attractive town of Rochester is finally getting its act together after dwindling inexplicably in the doldrums for years.
This least blighted by modern development of all the Medway towns is strongly associated with the author, who spent both the formative years of his childhood and his old age here. He loved the place so much he longed to be buried in its moat - and if his wishes had been respected, Rochester, so many of whose locations were dramatised by Dickens, might have marked a point of pilgrimage for literature-lovers from all over the world.
As it was, Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey. Medway, in Dickens’s time a boom area, declined in prosperity as shipbuilding came to a halt, and as tourists stayed away in droves, Rochester’s Charles Dickens Centre closed its doors.
Now Medway is on the up again, with the reincarnation of Chatham Dockyards - just 10 minutes down the road from Rochester - as an arts centre. So Dickens rules OK again, both in a dedicated section of Rochester’s Guildhall Museum, and a new self-guided walk of all the significant places associated with the man and his writing.
The writer’s love affair with Rochester began in 1817, when the Dickens family moved to a small house in Chatham. So profound was the effect of living in Medway, then a thriving maritime conurbation, that the author drew of many of the intriguing buildings he saw as a boy on his long walks with his father as settings for his stories.
At the museum, this story is told, tabloid fashion, in a new set of Dickens Discovery Rooms. The Guildhall itself, one of the finest 17th century buildings in the country and a former magistrates court, was itself harnessed in Great Expectations as the place where Mr. Pumblechook brought Pip to be bound over as an apprentice. Now it is home to many items contemporary with Dickens including a reconstruction of a prison ship.
The walking tour takes in other major sights including Restoration House, which Dickens had in mind in his vivid word picture of Miss Havisham’s overgrown mansion, the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel, which was named in The Pickwick Papers, The Vines, which featured in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the house which inspired Mister Pumblechook’s house in Great Expectations. Also on the route is the somewhat incongruous gingerbread chalet behind the high street which was sent to Dickens by an actor friend from Switzerland and became his writer’s shed.
It’s a shame you have to be part of a group of 10 before you can enjoy the £3, hour-long tour from a costumed guide, a third part of the new Dickens-led tourism bid which really brings life to the sites with stories about the sites. You can still, for example, see the Old Corn Exchange with its huge clock looming precariously over the pavement, but you’d never know that Dickens was convinced it would one day fall on his head as he scurried past.
The first weekend of June sees an annual Dickens festival with a costumed parade; there’s also a sweeps festival at the end of April featuring a slightly bizarre mix of local chimney sweeps and Morris dancers - very Dickens in its own way. But Rochester repays a visit at any time, with the second largest cathedral in England, an equally fine Norman castle and riverboat trips on the River Medway aboard the last coal-fired paddle steamer in Britain.
And that’s before you even get into the shopping - Rochester’s handsome high street contains today’s equivalent of the Old Curiosity Shop in a string of eclectic boutiques more or less opposite the visitor centre. As well as a few good antique shops, a proper old-fashioned sweetshop and a couple of manufacturing jewellers with fine selections of vintage silver and baubles, there are Kit and Caboodle for interesting accessories and a totally contemporary Danish fashion store, Copenhagen Blue.
One day, Rochester may get the boutique hotel it deserves; for the moment visitors must be content with B&B, some quite highly-rated, or a Holiday Inn on the outskirts. But at less than two hours’ drive from London, vs. the stage-coach ride of several days in Dickens’s time, Rochester can also be considered simply a great day out.
Useful links
Medway Tourism Office
Restoration House
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