History
The Rochester constituency is an old one, going back to the 16th century, but it saw many changes in the 20th century. From 1885-1918 the wider area was split between Chatham, Gillingham and the "old", rural, Medway constituency. The Chatham seat joined Rochester to form Rochester and Chatham in 1950, which formed the core of Medway in 1983.
When the boroughs of Rochester upon Medway and Gillingham merged to form, then confusingly, a unitary authority named Medway in 1998, the Parliamentary constituency of Medway only covered part of the new borough, so from the 2010 election the seat was renamed to the more precise and narrow division it covered and now covers, Rochester and Strood.
Read more about this topic: Rochester And Strood (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)