Walk 2 in the Go Folkestone Walks :
The Town Centre and The Leas
A level walk of about 1.3 miles starting in the heart of old
Folkestone at the top of the Old High Street ,or at any nearby pub or café e.g.
Wetherspoons in Grace Hill ,The Guildhall or British Lion in The Bayle , Café
Rendezvous Street . Wetherspoons is situated strikingly in the
old Central Baptist Church on Grace Hill ,renamed in the 1840s when the huge
Nonconformist church offering Christian Grace to those in need was built. It may
seem an unlikely and inappropriate pub. However long periods of emptiness were
punctuated in the eighties and nineties by unsuccessful uses as a theatre school
and a covered market. The pub company really saved it and painted it up
beautifully with a false sky on the ceiling and many tablets and monuments to
former ministers and parishioners left in place . In the artful first floor
gallery are the remains of the old church organ pipe.
From the top of the Old High Street spot the curious brown jars plastered onto
the outside of the corner shop in Victorian times. These were apparently oil
jars signalling like early advertisements that the shop sold the large amounts
of oil necessary to light lamps in the age before gas light became common in
houses in the 1860s. Electricity did not become common until the1920s,and in
fact in Britain in 1940 there were still more homes without electric light than
with it . Just along in the Bayle Parade are the little plaster pigs of the old
pork butcher Tom Taylor’s still surviving above the former shop window.
The Bayle is the most attractive Georgian or Early Victorian part of Folkestone.
The brown Ragstone in some of the cottages is a true Kentish building stone
quarried probably at Aldington. Rough , imposing and durable it is more familiar
in bigger buildings such as Maidstone Prison or Rochester Castle.
The Parish Church is dedicated to St Mary, and St Eanswythe, but it is St
Eanswythe who is the true patron, the Virgin Mary only being added in the 14th
century when there was a trend away from local saints. St Eanswythe founded a
nunnery here in about 623AD. Legend has it that there was no water on the site
and that she therefore made the Pent Stream flow uphill to provide it. Nothing
visible remains of this earlier building but when works were going on in 1885 to
extend the parish church a lead casket of the right style with the bones of a
young women were found in a covered niche . Experts felt that the bones were
those of a young woman about twenty five. Your first thought might be that a
girl was uncommonly young to build a nunnery and run it for long enough before
the age of twenty five to become a saint. But Kent at the time was a kingdom,
one of the seven ancient kingdoms of England between about 460AD and about 850AD
along with Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia and Sussex. As a
kingdom founded by a distinct tribe from the rest of the nations , the Jutes ,
it had the most different language or dialect . St Eanswythe was the pious
daughter of King Eadbald of Kent. His father King Ethelbert was the famous king
who had invited St Augustine the first monk to spread Christianity into Southern
England , but Eadbald had slipped back into the old pagan ways badly enough to
marry his father’s second wife. However he saw the light eventually and as such
it is quite possible that she was creating the nunnery on her father’s land, as
believed, at the age of eighteen. This would mean that the bones were indeed St
Eanswythe’s 1400 year old relics to be prayed to for intercession between the
supplicant and God in the Middle Ages. They were probably hidden away when the
Puritans came around in the 1640’s, after the English Civil War smashing or at
least removing all vestiges of statues, relics and other Catholic idolatry.
In the churchyard is the mayor making stone marking the site where the new
mayors of Folkestone have been blessed since medieval times, as an obligation of
the ancient town charter. Within the church, it can be quite difficult to spot
the join between the 14th century original and the Victorian extension. The 14th
cent. part has a medieval knight’s tomb & an alabaster tomb from the 1600s with
two well sculpted cavaliers. Medieval wall paintings such as The Jesse Tree,
showing the giant family tree of Jesse, Jacob , Joseph etc as a literal tree are
unfortunately covered but there are stained glass windows in the Victorian part
by a famous maker Kempe that are clearly top class, the best being two small
windows of the story of Adam and Eve. It is open between 11am and 1.00pm most
day .
Going around the church towards the sea, one comes out on a footpath turning
right to The Leas which goes past Albion Villas . Here Charles Dickens stayed
several times , and wrote often of Pavilionstone as he called it : ‘’ Let no one
with corns come to Pavilionstone for there are breakneck flight of ragged steps
connecting the principal streets by back ways , which will cripple that visitor
in half an hour [ down around Beach Street ]……I observe some wooden cottages
with tumbledown outhouses and backyards three feet square adorned with garlands
of dried fish ‘’. He stayed notably for the summer in 1855 when he tried to
write part of Little Dorrit, but strangely enough he found Folkestone too busy
and distracting!
’’ Now the down tidal train is telegraphed, the bell goes, the locomotive
shrieks and hisses and two hundred and eighty seven people come scuffling out.
Now there is not only a tide of water but a tide of people and a tide of
luggage, all tumbling and flowing and bouncing about together. ‘’ Folkestone had
been sleepy but was enjoying it’s first tourist and railway boom in the 1840s.
The South Eastern Railway Company had bought the bankrupt harbour which had been
silting up for £18,000, which was a steal even in 1843. It built a railway right
down to the harbour and ran from here the main Continental boat trains to
London. Strange that today we have an unwanted harbour up for sale and hopes of
another revival led by seafront development and railways. The more things change
the more they stay the same, including I suppose most of Folkestone’s advantages
and disadvantages .
Cutting up the West Terrace past the War Memorial and first looking down the
Road of Remembrance we are in the place where' in the First World War,, tens of
thousands of troops marched down the hill to the harbour to disembark for the
battlefields of Picardy ,almost visible across the Channel . West Terrace has
been fairly comprehensively redeveloped compared with Sandgate Road, but with
Victorian survivals right next to 1970’s & 80’s offices . Does the combination
work in any way , once you get used to it , and is it in scale ? A worthwhile
question to ask with the possibility of modern developments opposite Marine
Crescent and in Bouverie Square .
Around the corner in the lobby of Barton House office block is the oddest little
monument in Folkestone, a gravestone to Hector ‘A FOND AND FAITHFUL
FRIEND,,,,,MURDERED ‘ . I have found nobody yet who can even confirm this is a
memorial to a dog let alone tell the story . Was this part of a garden broken
into by vicious burglars , with a stone tended for many years by the owner? Was
it a dark alleyway and was Hector’s owner a watchman apprehending robbers .
Either way it says a lot for the incredible British love of animals that it
should have survived intact the building of an office block and several other
developments since October 1854, through a period when human gravestones were
quite often taken up and moved. Perhaps it is the pain in the simple epitaph,
more stark than one might dare put on a human memorial.
Past the old Victorian Post Office with its eroding sandstone monograms to
Victoria Regina . Folkestone converts its churches and theatres to pubs and it’s
post offices to KFCs, but at least they are still there which is the main thing.
Notice the old coal shoots into the shop and house basements from when coal
deliveries were a necessary part of life . As usual it is the first floors which
are oldest, and the ground floors which are disfigured by ever more mass
produced fascias. Cheriton Place contains the best ice cream parlour in Kent,
all home made including liquorice, orange chocolate and profiterole flavours .
17th MAY 1942 : Four Focke Wolf bombers launched a Sunday morning attack on
Folkestone perhaps echoing the shock value of the Sunday morning Pearl Harbour
attack six months before. Carrying a 500 kilo bomb each they skimmed the waves,
determinedly avoiding the radar, in a so called ‘tip and run’ sneak attack
typical of the period after the Battle of Britain. In the biggest church in
Folkestone , Christ Church , there were just three people ; in half an hour
there would have been over a hundred . Miss May Thompson aged 66 was hard of
hearing and always made sure of a good seat at the front by arriving really
early . Mrs Vera Ansell was the verger and got there in time to organised the
setting out of the flowers and hymnbooks for the main Sunday Service . Mrs
Louisa Pearn was helping her that day. On The Leas, three ranks of soldiers,
obliged in those times to go to church on Sunday in their entirety were forming
up for a morale boosting Church Parade, a short march to Christ Church. The
first 500 kilo ( 80 stone ) bomb hit the church whilst the observation post on
East Cliff was still phoning the RAF Station for air cover. You can see now that
nothing was left intact apart from the tower with its didactic but appropriate
Victorian motto . Miss Thompson died, as they say, instantly. Mrs Ansell, 47,
died later at the Royal Vic. Mrs Pearn survived. The gardens, as most
Folkestonians know are now the focus of our Remembrance Day ceremonies.
Holy Trinity Church up the Sandgate Road had been closed for the duration of the
war, and might have become permanently surplus to requirements, but ironically
had to be reopened and is still well used.
Of the three other bombs, a type which could bounce on hard ground until it
exploded, one went through The Grand and exploded in the road next to the
Metropole, one destroyed 57 Bouverie Road West, and the fourth bounced once
right over Balfour Court in Sandgate Road, once over Plain Road and once in
Bouverie Road West before destroying three houses in Godwyn Gardens.
Turn left down to The Leas, past the Harvey bar. One side of this road is
Langhorne Gardens and the other side is Clifton Gardens. In the last century
such houses were named from the gardens behind them that the whole square
shared, but it can be confusing .Almost straight ahead at the end is the viewing
platform with its human sized chess board stretching above the perilously poised
Leas Cliff Hall . People take the LCH for granted, but, built in 1927, it is an
amazingly brave piece of architecture with foundations heavily strengthened to
prevent it slipping downhill, as, periodically, does the cliffside. Turning
right we pass the ornate bandstand ,typical of Victorian seaside resorts and
erected in 1895, the same decade as the Grand and the Metropole. Across the sea
you can see not only France but also the wide curve of Hythe Bay with the 3
cooling towers of the Dungeness nuclear power station and the two lighthouses.
One of these is much further out than the other marking the gradual piling up of
the rare and strange Dungeness, the largest shingle foreland in Europe . So wide
is the bay that, in the Second World War, a Polish air squadron operating out of
Romney crossed the Bay and bombed Folkestone thinking they had arrived in
France. Friendly fire .
Coming to the wide crescent of Clifton Crescent you can see the elegant curve
interrupted intentionally so that Holy Trinity Church could be seen from The
Leas. You can also see the ultimate monstrosity at the west end of Clifton
Crescent where again a 1970s block of flats is precisely balanced (!) with a
pretty Dutch-gabled 1870s house. Worth a photograph as how not to do it .This
was built before the area was declared a conservation area and hopefully would
not happen now ,but developers will always try it on. Again ,showing what a
battering the town had , the wide curved green was the site of Folkestone’s main
battery during the Second World War , Four 5.5in naval guns originally on the
battleship HMS Hood all faced out to sea from 1940 specifically to protect
against German naval invasion. In fact Hitler’s invasion plans known as
Operation Sea Lion, had the 17th Infantry Division landing on Prince’s Parade in
Seabrook and punching around to capture Folkestone Harbour as a priority . So
the Hotel Imperial could have been the first major British building in Nazi
hands. Other divisions were to land on beaches strung out westwards such as
Cooden Beach near Hastings , Tragically the battery became a major target. There
was a concrete command post on the green at the west end of Clifton Crescent and
in 1941 five workmen taking shelter from an air-raid were killed by a direct hit
on the post . They might have survived if the concrete strengthening they were
building had dried. The end of Clifton Crescent was demolished , so in a sense
the seventies monstrosity is their only memorial.
On a lighter note, you walk next past the Victorian manor house of the Earl of
Radnor to the two pleasure palaces of The Grand and The Metropole. Built in
competition in the 1890s, The Metropole first, these were top class hotels and
gentlemens’ apartments , along with The Burlington, at a time when Folkestone
was successfully aiming at the upper end of the market. This was the policy of
the Earl of Radnor and the council from the beginning, specifically waving much
of the lower class trade along to Ramsgate and Margate. With spacious gardens,
beautiful walks such as the Edwardian Zig –Zag path & the sea it had a lot going
for it. Add easy rail/ ferry connections to Paris and Le Touquet at a time when
even the upper classes aspired to go little further and you can understand why
Edward V11 and Edward, Prince of Wales & Mrs Simpson stayed . There was a second
cliff lift from opposite The Metropole of which you can still see the
foundations. Of course nowadays The Metropole is an pleasant music and arts
centre, well set in the ornamented plaster rooms and marbled halls, though with
some rather bizarre abstract exhibitions at times. It has the licensed health
club and an excellent vegetarian café called Fig, which is recommended . The
Grand is licensed for weddings and functions and has several apartments to let
to holidaymakers in an echo of the old days. The Folkestone Arts Society and
others regularly show there. The conservatory restaurant at the front has always
been known as the Monkey House because ‘monkey ‘ was slang for a man in evening
dress and patrons, as if in a zoo, were partially visible to those walking along
The Leas.
The Martello Tower at the end of the Leas would clearly have had a very clear
shot across to Sandgate Castle before the house was built. Martello Towers were
neatly designed simple forts with three storeys & 8-10 feet thick walls curved
to take the force of cannon, and thicker on the seaward side. Nelson was
impressed by a similar little fort that he took ages to reduce at Cape Mortella
in Corsica. This led to a recommendation to build a chain , which happened
between 1804 and 1809. Bearing in mind Napoleon’s Grand Armee which had been
poised in Boulogne in 1801-2, to invade England it seemed like a good idea. Each
covered the next with cannon fire from a twenty four pounder running right
around a rail on top of the tower. Each had a detachment of soldiers to harry
the enemy, including, after the war, smugglers. They were built in a defensive
chain from Seaford to Folkestone and in East Anglia, but those in Shepway are
the most continuous and best preserved ,apart from this pretty ivy-clad ruin.
Acknowledgements : Target Folkestone ; Dickens in Folkestone by Anne Nevill M.A.
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