AT THE RISK OF suggesting that everything was better in the old days … Rochester Market isn’t a patch on what it was.

A multi-storey car park will be built on the market site nestling between the railway line and Corporation Street and the stallholders will be on the move when the riverside plans bear fruit.

I loved going there with my mother in the 1960s and was much impressed by the shirts, hardware and bright fabrics. And the meat stall revolted me. 

My mother, however, was very dismissive of it and insisted it compared poorly to the vast markets of northern towns, especially in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, near where she was brought up.

The market move is the end of an era, but by Rochester standards, not that long an age: The Corporation Street market has been there, initially as a cattle market, since 1787.

The right to hold markets and fairs in Rochester was granted by charters. One was a three-day fair to be held on St Dunstan’s Day (19 May); another of the same length on St Andrew’s Day (30 November). A corn market was held every Tuesday. Another market — including a pillory — was held for a time at the back of the King’s Head near Epaul Lane (also known in those days as Apple or Epple Lane).

The regular Friday market was held under the Guildhall. A charter of 29 May, 1675, decreed that butter should be sold there and benches “and other conveniences” should be provided for that purpose. Stalls also offered poultry, pigs and garden produce.

Rochester High Street was also a market, of sorts. It was even narrower then than it is now and traders had a habit of putting their wares for sale outside their shops, which made it all rather congested. Regulations, therefore, had to be made by the city council to stop this nuisance. 

A rule passed in June, 1698, particularly concerned butchers, who were the worst nuisance. It said they should not sell their meat in the streets, but in the butter market, and only at specified times. It also decreed that: “No hucksters [sellers of small articles], higlers [peddlers] or other person whatever shall buy any butter, eggs, fruit, fowls, poultry or any other provisions in the market of the city called the butter market with the intention to sell the same again until notice should be given by a bell to be rung at one o’clock ...”

Some disobeyed the rules. In 1731, city magistrates were told of a Mr Holliden who used the marker for “drying his skins, which the butchers have complained that they find very noisome and ill convenient”.

The need was obviously growing for a cattle market. In December 1783, the Mayor of Rochester asked for “advice and assistance in gaining information [about] what will be the most easy and effectual method of procuring a market for the sale of live cattle within this city...”

Within a couple of weeks, the town clerk was asked to “take all necessary steps as shall be thought expedient to get a cattle market held on the fourth Tuesday in every month within the said city.” And so it came to be. I cannot recall cattle on the market, but it was certainly used until the Second World War and probably after.

Let's hope the market move will spark a revival.

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