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Town Profile


When Borough Green had three cycle shops, two fence makers and one Electric Palace cinema….


by Peter Erlam


Today, a visitor from the Victorian era would not recognise Borough Green. If they were to arrive by train, they might look back wistfully to the day in 1874 when the railway first arrived in their village and how, three years later, the first large housing development was planned, at Western Road.


The 1870s was also a landmark decade for


progress, elsewhere. Edison patented the phonograph, ball bearings were first used on bicylces and the Factory Act raised the minimum working age to nine. Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty and Swan Lake had its premiere. By 1900, the year before Queen Victoria died,


there were more than 200 houses in Borough Green. In the 1930s it was a thriving, growing community. At that time, the village boasted a cinema, three cycle shops, 10 grocers, three butchers, two bakers, a saddler, a blacksmith, three dairies, two fence makers, three coal merchants - as well as several other tradesmen - plus five pubs. Mike Taylor, parish council chairman, pointed out that it was not until 1976 that Borough Green became a separate ecclesiastical parish. Prior to that, the village was divided into three church parishes, Ightham, Wrotham and Platt. So, of the five pubs, only one of them - the Fox and Hounds - was actually in Borough Green itself. Mr Taylor explained: "Because the boundaries came so far into


the village, the Black Horse was in Platt, the Rock Tavern and Red Lion were in Ightham and the Railway Hotel was in Wrotham." The latter, now named the Henry Simmonds, after


its first owner in 1878, is the youngest of the five. One of its stables was used for some years as a mortuary by the old Wrotham Urban District Council. A feature of the premises was a magnificent Chile pine tree, which sadly fell victim to the hurricane of October 1987. That same district council planned a mains


drainage scheme in 1911 that was not completed till 1932. Its members were sometimes not held in high esteem - in fact, two bids were made to disband the council. Amusingly - though rather disrespectfully - the Sevenoaks Chronicle opined in 1922: "They had a pantomime at Seal last Saturday evening, but in comparison with the entertainment provided at the Wrotham Urban District Council meeting at the Railway Hotel on Monday, it was a milk and water affair." Town gas had arrived in 1880, piped water in 1900


Mid Kent Living 13


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