The Story of Jezreel's Tower, Watling Street/Canterbury Street in Gillingham, Kent
Picture postcard view of Jezreel's Tower, Gillingham also known as Jezreel's Folly. The tower was built along Watling Street (A2) at Gillingham and the bus stop there is still named after the tower. You can find out more about the Jezreel's Tower here
Interior view of Jezreels Tower
This structure, started in 1886 was the home of the Jezreelite sect (founded in 1875 by James White or Jezreel) remained unfinished and was demolished in 1961. Photo from Medway Council. (Couchman collection DE402, Medway Council)
Photo from Martin Smith.
LCP Autoparts on Canterbury Street
One of the remaining Jezreel's buildings at the top of Canterbury Street, Gillingham was demolished in 2008. LCP Autoparts occupied the building that was previously the Jezreel's Hall on Canterbury Street. The site remains empty as of 2017.
Below you can see the similarity of the brickwork at the top of the roofline compared to the original tower. Photo from Mark at Medway Lines of Jezreels building LCP Autoparts Canterbury Street Gillingham.
This is an article about the Jezreels Tower printed c1920 in the Chatham Rochester and Gillingham News, the local paper of the time. Unfortunately the paper is quite faded so it not possible to easily convert to text using OCR but these are high quality scans on the pages. Click on each section to view a high resolution version.
Map to show location of site of Jezreels Tower in Gillingham
Comments
I never knew the history behind it, and in following up the various links I was amazed at how much history there is around Gillingham. Thank you for posting the article.
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