NOTES ON
1954 – Life at 12
Hart Street, Maidstone
http://comp.uark.edu/~dsears/photos/Eileen55hartstreet
Most
grown ups would not have liked the houses at 12-16 Hart Street, squeezed in
between the market, the railway goods yard, and the industries of central
Maidstone, awnings for a garden fence.
Yet they gave the three families that lived there a particular
friendship and they gave young children a rich and varied life; circuses
arriving at the goods yard, farm animals filling the streets to the market,
wrestling in the market hall on Wednesday evenings, the general market on
Tuesdays with lots of treasures to plunder afterwards. Then there was the River Medway, another
different place to explore. Mum and Dad
worried about safety, the diseases, especially those associated with the
river. Two or three times, the river
rose and the houses flooded. But my
parents loved the friendship of close neighbours, and Mum’s closest brother,
Ern, lived at number 16. Mum and Dad
almost lived in the garden, flowers round the side and vegetables in the
back. We hardly ever bought
vegetables. The three families who
lived at 12, 14 and 16 Hart Street negotiated over who would have their
vegetable patch destroyed to give way to the Firework’s Day celebrations on
November 11. Dad usually lost. When I grew older, and went to the Tech, and
crashed into the awkward years, I was reluctant to take friends there because
it was not a “normal” place to live.
The
row of houses was called Bodkin Cottages and carried a plaque dating them at
1856. They were made of Kentish
Ragstone. At one point in my childhood
the corporation dug up the yard – I cannot remember why – and found a tunnel
connecting the houses to the Archbishop’s Palace on the other side of the
river. Apparently the houses were once
stables for the palace and must have been much older than 1856. In the 1970s the houses were demolished to
make way for a Pickford’s Warehouse. I
have a photograph of the warehouse.
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12-16 Hart Street as it appeared in 1999. The Pickfords warehouse covers a little more than the land covered by Bodkin Cottages and their gardens. |
