INTRA CHATHAM

Chatham Intra Highstreet Action Zone (CIHAZ)

Research concerning the future of Chatham Intra led by the

Kent School of Architecture and Planning, University of Kent

In association with Medway Council and Historic England

KSAP MArch Unit-1 (2021-22)

From the establishment of Watling Street by the Romans, between London and Canterbury, Chatham Intra has been on the main road to somewhere. The Gregorian Mission of 595AD, saw St Augustine re-introduce Christianity to England, and to establish Canterbury as its hub, Augustine himself becoming its first Archbishop in 597 AD. By 604 AD there were Roman Bishops in London and Rochester too. However, it was the martyrdom of the 41st Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas a Becket, in 1170, that established the act of journeying to Canterbury, as an act of ‘Pilgrimage’. Domestic Pilgrims journeyed to Canterbury predominantly from Winchester, via the North Downs Pilgrims Way, or from London, via Rochester, and Intra, along Watling Street – today the old A2 (and still Chatham High Street). The 1538 Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, and the destruction of Becket’s tomb, could be said to have ended religious pilgrimage, but the tourism legacy continues to this day.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales published circa 1400 tells the fictionalised account of a group of pilgrims who journey from London to Canterbury (and back) and undertake a story-telling contest to amuse themselves, with the prize being a free meal at the Tabard Inn, London, on their return. Each of 24 Tales take the form of a ‘Framed Tale’; a new story told within the frame of the broader story of the Pilgrims’ journey. Framed tales were a feature of Chaucer’s era, and continue to recur in literature, for example in flashback tropes, non- linear narratives, and have been used to develop concepts of ‘unreliable narrators’ that have seen a contemporary resurgence in literature and film. Chaucer’s Tales are believed to be incomplete, and there is debate about which sequence they should occur in – making mapping them to physical locations conjectural. There is however broad agreement on groupings of Tales forming ‘Fragments’. Chaucer’s Tales combine storytellers from a breadth of society, social strata, vocations, professions and trades, together with a diversity of motivations that straddle ethical and moral boundaries. The structure of storytelling sometimes seeks to undermine traditional hierarchy and the framed tales are often moral, apocryphal, and sometimes downright naughty. However, they all reflect the human condition, both of their time (and context of production), and arguably our time too. Literary scholars also discuss Chaucer’s Tales in terms of concepts of ‘Liminality’ – that is as having both the above structural configuration, but also having the capacity to be interpreted spatially: A liminal space, which can be both geographical as well as metaphorical or spiritual, is the transitional or transformational space between a “real” (secure, known, limited) world and an unknown or imaginary space of both risk and possibility.