Local history

It seems almost certain that the Romans built the first bridge across the Medway at Rochester. Their invading army may have built a temporary crossing shortly after the invasion but this would have been replaced with a stronger bridge some years later. We do not know what it looked like but in 1851, during the building of the modern cast iron bridge, the engineers struck the foundations of one of the Roman piers. This tells us that the line of the bridge was the same as today. The stone foundations those Victorians found probably supported a wooden roadway. Looking after a bridge is an expensive business. During the Anglo-Saxon period, the English kings began to spread the cost around local landowners by issuing charters which divided up the bridge and named the people responsible for each section.

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Despite partial reconstructions, by the middle of the 14th century the bridge was collapsing almost every year. The final straw was the winter of 1380/81, when the Medway froze and a large section of the bridge was carried away in the following thaw.

A new bridge, made entirely of stone, was finished in about 1391. It was built a little upstream of the present strucutre and was paid for by Sir John de Cobham and Sir Robert Knolles. Sir John was a local landowner, while Sir Robert had made a huge fortune during the wars with France. Together they worked to provide for the upkeep of the bridge, maintaining the system of raising money for repairs under the supervision of two elected wardens.

Rochester managed with the stone bridge until 1850, when work began on a cast iron structure at about the time that the railway bridge was also built. The new road bridge was finished in 1856 and shortly afterwards the Royal Engineers were called in to blow up the old one. All that remains is part of the stone balustrade, which now lines the Rochester esplanade. The new bridge was not without its problems, as the arches which supported the roadway were always getting tangled up with passing river traffic. As a result, the bridge was rebuilt in 1913 and the number of arches was reduced. This gave us the bridge we see today, although it is now accompanied by a second road bridge, which was opened in 1970.

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