Gillingham (Kent)

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Gillingham
High Street, Gillingham
High Street, Gillingham
Coordinates 51 ° 23 '  N , 0 ° 33'  E Coordinates: 51 ° 23 '  N , 0 ° 33'  E
Gillingham (England)
Gillingham
Gillingham
Residents 99,773 (as of 2001)
administration
Post town Gillingham
prefix 01634
Part of the country England
region South East England
Shire county Kent
Unitary authority Medway

Gillingham [ ˈdʒɪlɪŋəm ] is a town in Kent , England about 50 km east of central London ; it lies on the River Medway where it widens before it flows into the lower Thames . Gillingham had 101,810 inhabitants in 2006.

geography

Gillingham is a town and civil parish in Kent. It is northeast of Chatham . Administratively Gillingham jointly belongs to Rochester and Chatham to the Borough of Medway ; the common urbanization is colloquially referred to as Medway Towns . Gillingham itself includes the boroughs of Brompton, Hempstead, Rainham, Rainham Mark, Twydall and Lidsing.

history

Gillingham was already known to the Saxons under the name Gillinga. In the Domesday Book , it is referred to as a lyngeham. There was once a palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury in the place . At the time of Edward II the settlement was only a small market town , in later times it housed a base of the Royal Navy . The strategically favorable location at the mouth of the Thames predestined the place in the early modern period to a location for docks, which were founded by Queen Elizabeth I and then moved to their current location in 1622.

The place was attacked several times by Danes or Normans and many nobles who invaded in the wake of Edward and his brother Alfred were slain by Godwin of Wessex and his troops. To protect against attacks on the docks there, Charles I had a fortress built northwest of the town. This was later expanded and called Gillingham Castle, but demolished again for the expansion of the shipyard.

In 1667, in the Second Anglo-Dutch naval war, the Dutch managed not only to sail up the topic, but also to land on English soil at Gillingham before they could be driven out again after a short time. In 1758, during the Seven Years' War , the port facilities around Gillingham were fortified. The threat posed by the French during the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars forced the fortifications to be expanded further, so that in particular Fort Amherst in Gillingham, Fort Pitt in Chatham, and the Fort Delce and Clarence In Rochester were strengthened. In 1919 a bright obelisk was erected in Gillingham as a memorial to the British seamen who died in World War I. In 1984 the port facilities were closed.

literature

  • Philip Rogers: A history of Gillingham (Kent). Clements FA, Chatham 1947, OCLC 865823215 .
  • RT Chadwick: Chronology of Gillingham, 1860-1903. Gillingham Public Libraries, Kent 1973, ISBN 0-903316-06-4 .
  • Ronald A. Baldwin: The Gillingham chronicles. A history of Gillingham, Kent. Baggins Book Bazaar in association with Bruce Aubry, Rochester 1998, ISBN 1-901625-01-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gillingham, Kent. on ukga.org, accessed August 29, 2014.
  2. ↑ The Second Anglo-Dutch War 1665–1667. on archive.org, accessed August 29, 2014.