The local history of the town. The history of the local archive.

On Saturday Annie and I were very fortunate to have a personal town tour from Christoph Bull, District Manager of Gravesham Libraries and a member of the Gravesend Historical Society. When searching out stories it is always difficult to know where to start. “Local history is like an onion”, Christoph agreed, “layers upon layers upon layers”. This turned out to be not just a tour of sites of local historical significance, but a celebration of the heroic custodians of the accumulated archive. We met outside the Library on King Street (built 1905 and now being restored). Christoph explained that the local Library should always be the first point of call for local history needs. Historically the Librarians have been the keepers of the collection since 1893, protecting it from villains who wanted to pulp it and saving it from rotting away in damp storage. Nearby is the site of the long gone printers, Cabels, once responsible for the superior town directories dating back to 1831. Along the road is the Cooper House pub, on the site of Cooper’s furniture and undertaker’s establishment. John Hanks Cooper was an influential politician who got the Libraries Act passed in Gravesend in 1892. Just down the High Street, is the site of Robert Pocock’s printing press, the town’s first in 1786. As well as establishing a subscription library, Pocock was author of the first history of Gravesend. He fell out with the grandees of the Town Hall, who not only bankrupted him, but also banned him from the archive. “You can’t have local historians not co-operating with each other”, Christoph added, ”you need a network of people who know, so there is always someone to ask. It is how information works on a human level.” During the tour we had two sightings of local history legend Tony Larkin, once in a pub, once in a café. He is someone we need to track down in the near future. As we walked towards the Old Town Hall, Christoph led us through the story of shifting legislative territories, borough boundaries and local mayoralties, where independence and identity seem to struggle amid the tangle of bureaucracy. At the centre of all these administrative threads is the Old Town Hall. The decisions taken by successive incumbents are preserved in meeting minutes going back centuries. Even the keepers of the archive can become the subject of the archive. When Christoph joined the Library Service in 1977 it was a time of transition. He has recorded what Dean Harris, County Librarian, thought about the changes, “because that is history that is going to disappear. So I’ve got everything tabulated. It is vital to have a passion for it.” Christoph grew up in Gravesend and became a historian because “every time I came into town as a child they were messing it up.” As we walked, the places that had been erased seemed just as significant as the traces of history still left standing. Gravesend’s history and streets seem littered with the remnants of partially completed grand plans or flawed redevelopments and from the ‘local boy’s’ perspective, so much has been lost. As the tour came full circle back to the Library, we asked about all the Historical Societies in the surrounding neighbourhoods. There seems to be hundreds of people, a small army, enthusiastically keeping the past in the present. The challenge for the Talking Halls project is how to do justice to such carefully preserved stories.
Lucy