Towns Through Time

Authors Avatar

Robert Foard        11E        20/9/08

Main Investigation

How useful are the following sources in arriving at an accurate understanding of Dartford high street in the mid nineteenth century?

There has been much development and change in Dartford after the eighteenth century. One of the many reasons for this is the growth of industry and the manufacture of the railway, this town has gone from being solely from being a market-town and coaching post to developing more towards industry.     The High Street has changed a lot since the nineteenth century in terms of functions, shops, conditions, etc. There are many ways of finding out what it used to be like, including sources, the census, and the existing buildings.

There are six main buildings in Dartford high street which I am studying. These buildings are generally quite simple to put a rough date to them. The rough date that we can confidently give these buildings is that they are from the Georgian era, with a couple also being from the Victorian era. Some of these buildings, such as the Bull’s Head yard building have certain features about it which can help give details about the actual street and its functions, not just the building. The Bulls Head yard building has a pulley system attached to it, which could suggest a warehouse and cart way on the other hand this does not necessarily mean that the street had many carts going over it. Although, source C (the engraving of Dartford high street), suggests that carts were common in Dartford high street. Moreover, the Bull and Victoria Hotel gives some evidence to suggest that coaches were popular in Dartford as well. We can see this because the entrance is fairly wider than it would normally be for an ordinary building or hotel, therefore suggesting that this building could have been a coach house.

Join now!

So overall, although the buildings show individual purpose and use, they in themselves, do not necessarily show what the high street was like in the 1800s.

The strengths of this source are that this report gives detailed information on the conditions of Dartford High Street concerning matters of hygiene and sanitation. It is an official enquiry by the General Board of Health and written by William Ranger; therefore, it must have some reliability. It was also written in the nineteenth century so Ranger would have known exactly what it was like. The report implies that Dartford is not a very ...

This is a preview of the whole essay