The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient TurnpikeHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Dover Road (England); England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
Electric tramcars now rush and rattle through Northfleet and Rosherville,
and no one contemplates journeying to these scenes with the object of
spending a "happy day." The great group of semi-ecclesiastical looking
buildings on the left is "Huggens' College." Almshouses continue to be
built, for the fountain of benevolence is not yet dried up. It was in 1847
that this foundation came into existence, pursuant to the will of John
Huggens (born 1776), who was a barge-owner and corn-merchant of
Sittingbourne. Looking upon a world rather astonishingly full of
almshouses for people of humble birth, he conceived the somewhat original
idea of founding what, with extreme delicacy, he termed a "College" for
gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. The establishment, strictly
secluded behind enclosing walls, in well-wooded grounds, houses fifty
collegians. Huggens himself, in stony effigy, is seen over the gateway,
seated in a frockcoat and an uncomfortable attitude, and displaying a
scroll or the charter of his "College." The bountiful gentleman is sadly
weatherworn, for the factory fumes of this industrial district have
wrought havoc with the Portland stone from which he is sculptured. Huggens
was wise among the generation of benefactors: he founded his charity in
his own lifetime, and personally supervised it. He died in 1865, and his
body lies in Northfleet churchyard.
We will now proceed to Gravesend, noting that in 1787 the slip road
between the "Leather Bottle" at Northfleet and the beginnings of Chalk,
two miles in length, was made. It would, in the language of to-day,
applied to incandescent gas-mantle burners and to avoiding roads alike, be
called a "by-pass."
[Sidenote: GRAVESEND]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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