We started our short tour of Wigmore as we turned off the Maidstone Road into Woodside. The latter might be described as the one-time centre of Wigmore. At the Maidstone Road end is the Queen's Head and at the other is the Spyglass and Kettle. In between is Wigmore Nursery School (once a chapel), Wigmore Post Office and the Smallholders Club. Wigmore's other institutions (the Park, St Matthew's Church and Community Centre and Fairview Schools) have become established well away from Woodside on what were among the last remaining orchards in the area. The centre of Wigmore has therefore now spread south, so as to include Drewery Drive and Fairview Avenue - where Wigmore Library has also been established.
The first large scale ordnance survey map of the area, published in the 1860s, shows that Wigmore takes its name from a group of buildings (which we assume constituted a large country house) on the edge of an orchard and surrounded by woods. (The Spyglass and Kettle now stands on the site of these buildings and a house in Woodside called 'The Orchard' stands in what was once part of the adjoining orchard.) The revised map of the early 1900s shows that a smallpox hospital had by then been built on the southern boundary of the War Department's East Hoath wood. A few scattered houses had also been erected amongst the woods and coppices to the south of the hospital. But the area was still a very isolated part of Gillingham, for it appears on the map to have been served by little more than unmetalled country lanes and footpaths. But land was cheap in the 1930s and this encouraged a growth of housing (mainly bungalows and summer houses) set in large plots of land. Wigmore continued to grow plot by plot - or more accurately in later years, infill by infill. Its development has thus been in complete contrast to that of its neighbour Parkwood, on the other side of the Maidstone Road, which was developed almost in one fell swoop.
Before leaving Wigmore we did a short diversion to the only building in the area, which gets a mention in the guide books, St Matthew's Parish Church of South Gillingham. It is a light and auy building designed, so we read, to encourage the greatest possible participation in services by the congregation.
We headed out of Wigmore along Hoath Lane, a short distance down which we turned left and passed under the M2 link road through a pedestrian tunnel. It runs along what was once Hospital Hill Road where stood the Alexandra (Princess of Wales) smallpox hospital. The latter had been established by Gillingham's Local Board of Health following a series of smallpox epidemics in the latter part of the 19th century. (In 1872 a Government inspector conducting an Inquiry into sanitary conditions reported that in the whole of his experience he had never come across a place in such a disgraceful state as New Brompton!)
Once out of the tunnel we climbed up Hempstead Road towards Hempstead itself. To our right we could see the Darland Banks. Over our head a raucous cry drew our attention to a jay. This colourful member of the crow family is still fairly common locally, despite diminishing woodland.
In 1907, when its "pretty little school" was opened with 28 children on the roll, Hempstead was described as "the delightful rural suburb of Gillingham." Ideas were being muted at that time of developing the village as a garden city, but clearly nothing became of them. However, much new housing is currently being built at Hempstead and this has ensured the survival of the village school, as well as All Saints Church (built in 1911 as a satellite of St Mary's Parish church Gillingham) and the local public house, the Flying saucer. One can imagine the more energetic people of Chatham walking up to the Flying Saucer on Summer Sundays of long ago, although it presumably had a more mundane name in those days.
Just outside Hempstead we dismounted at the "No Entry" sign and walked down Chapel Lane. Opposite Hempstead Valley Shopping Centre we had a look at the site, in the corner of a wood, and near a solitary yew tree, of St Mary Magdalene Chapel, Lidsing. A newspaper report in 1880 said of the Chapel built in the middle ages," for years past the edifice has been gradually decaying and crumbling away... the worshippers have assembled themselves in the neighbouring shrine at Bredhurst - the whole place bears the stamp of desolation and ruin." The Chapel was pulled down in 1885, being a danger to gypsies and tramps using it for shelter. One of its doorways was placed in Restoration House in Rochester and its bell was removed to a Chatham Factory. A photograph was taken of what appear to be local dignitaries (and an Army sergeant?) standing in front of the mediaeval chapel prior to its demolition. These men could never have foreseen, or imagined in their strangest dreams, that one day thousands of people would daily converge on the isolated valley, opposite their ruined chapel to do their shopping, by a mode of transport some of them would probably never live to see.
Leaving the crowds behind us, we soon regained the Maidstone Road, after which an easy ride downhill brought us home.
