Buildings
The gatehouse is now all that remains of Shurland Hall, connected with many families including the Cheneys who were here in 1274; and Sir John Stanley, who was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports in the 15th century. It was also rumoured to have housed Henry VIII and his wife, Anne Boleyn for a few nights. For a short period before the National Trust acquired it, it was owned by Violet Searle, a business lady who developed an early house within the village in Warden Road. The gatehouse is now in the care of the National Trust, and is now in the process of being renovated and restored, this is also being documented by a TV station.
In Hidden Kent by Alan Major (Countryside Books, 1994), there is a note from the 1847 gazetteer commenting on the scarcity of fresh water which "makes the inhabitants very careful to preserve such falls from the clouds...." and tells of spouts from the church designed to fill large tubs around it in the churchyard.
Royal Navy Shore Station HMS Pembroke II was RNAS Eastchurch, Sheppey, Kent. An Accounting Base it was operational June 1913 to 1 April 1918 when it was turned over to the RAF. Also known as HMS Pembroke 2, it moved to Chatham as an Accounting Base 1940-57. The Shore Station was named after the nearby main base, HMS Pembroke I at the royal Dockyard in Chatham.
At the centre of the village is the large and extravagant church, All Saints (1437). Currently, the parish priest is the Reverend Father Barry Birch SSC, who has been here since October 2008. His predecessor Father Francis Searle was parish priest from September 2000 until his untimely death in 2007. Father Searle was the grandson of Violet Searle, mentioned above. The church had recently gone under a project, known as the 'Jubilee Project', also known as the 'Tower Appeal'. This involved bringing down the bells and restoring them (for the first time in 100 years). And the tower itself being modernised and a new floor/room being added. This is now known as the 'Jubilee Room', funded by such sponsors as the Shurland Hotel.
Eastchurch is also home to three prisons - HMP Elmley, HMP Standford Hill and HMP Swaleside. The prisons complex is known as the Sheppey Prisons Cluster.
Read more about this topic: Eastchurch
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)