Treasure Hunt

Today's scamper round Rochester was set for me by Kendall when on Sunday she told me
“I know what I'd love to see. I did my doctoral research on theatre of the Queen Anne era, so I would love to see either some tribute to Queen Anne or what has been built on the ashes of the two competing theatres of her day, Lincoln's Inn Fields and Drury Lane. So that's three requests, really, Queen Anne, LIF, and DL. Any one of the three would be a treasure to me.”

Well, I am 30 miles from London, so a trip to either Lincoln's Inn Fields or Drury Lane would, in present circumstances, come under the category of “unnecessary travel” so I opted for Queen Anne. I have never studied history in any shape and so I needed to look her up to learn that she was Queen from 1702 – 1707, quite a tiny window in comparison to some of our other female monarchs. Then I looked up historic buildings in Medway and sorted them by date. An absolute plethora down at the Dockyard, but all within the area inaccessible while it is closed to visitors.

However, Sir Cloudesley Shovel's Corn Exchange in Rochester High Street fits the bill to a tee.
What I love about this building is the way that the clock juts out as though it were a surrealist cuckoo clock, plus of course the fact that the distance it projects forward from the front of the building is approximately equal to the full depth of the building itself.

Also on my list were The Old Hall and The Old Vicarage, both on Boley Hill (side by side, up from the cathedral and behind the castle) which may not be exactly within the 1702-1707 window, but both of which are listed as “early 18th Century”. In extras

And whilst wandering around Rochester I happened, on two separate occasions, to bump into much-loved colleagues and we enjoyed long conversations in the evening sunshine keeping a safe distance. The latter of the two chance encounters has recovered from Covid-19. We semi-agreed to engineer another chance encounter since, like me, he is in solitary confinement miles and miles from family.