ASPECTS OF KENT’S ECCLESIASTICAL HERITAGE
The KAS Historic Buildings Conference will be held on Saturday 12th October, 2019, at Cobham Village Hall. The venue is the Meadow Room, The Street, Cobham, Gravesend DA12 3BZ. For full details go to the KAS website – click here.
‘Kent’s Disused, Ruined and Lost Churches’
A look at some of Kent’s former churches and chapels, including St Andrew’s chapel, Boxley, the subject of a recent archaeological study.
Speaker: David Carder, KAS Member and Adult Education Tutor.
‘The value of desktop assessments: revealing Wye College’s early history’
The talk draws very heavily on the work of Rupert Austin and Peter Seary who conducted an architectural survey and preliminary documentary research, respectively, on the medieval college of St Gregory and St Martin at Wye in 2016 and 2017. This late medieval college, founded by Archbishop Kemp, has survived remarkably intact from 1447 and although its future is perhaps in some ways less secure, the work undertaken by Canterbury Archaeological Trust for the new site owners will hopefully mean much survives for future generations. For unlike Cobham College, its new purpose will be far removed from its original devotional and charitable purpose. Thus, this seems a good opportunity to introduce you to this medieval gem, as revealed by Rupert and Peter, and to set it briefly in the wider context of the development of medieval college in Kent and more widely in England.
Speaker: Sheila Sweetinburgh (KAS/Canterbury Christ Church University)
‘The Old Rectory, Fawkham’
A history of this country rectory, showing its evolution from a cottage to a small gentleman’s villa in the early 19th century. Architectural clues (as would be used in the study of any building) are correlated with documentary and anecdotal sources, showing some interesting family connections of Rectors, curates and patrons.
Speaker: Christopher Proudfoot, a member of the KAS Historic Buildings group, has had a lifelong interest in architectural detail, particularly that of the 18th and 19th centuries, and wrote a thesis on the early 19th-century architect C.H. Tatham as part of his Cambridge Tripos examination in 1970.
Cobham College: ‘Out with the old and in with the New’.
During the first half of 2001, the roofs covering three of the four alms house ranges underwent an extensive scheme of refurbishment, the like of which had not been seen since their initial creation in the late sixteenth-century. Created from the former medieval secular college quadrangle based apartments, examination of each roof structure enabled an understanding of details associated with the earlier college buildings, as well as their later conversion into alms houses. Whilst some observations enabled clarity to our present understanding of the college buildings development, other details revealed how the earlier college buildings took on a very different appearance. In this fully illustrated presentation, it will be shown how significant the smallest piece of evidence can be to the building historian in piecing together and understanding the development of a standing historic building.
Speaker: Andrew Linklater, Canterbury Archaeological Trust.
