New Gate & Street, Rope Walk

Origins 

This is the site of the medieval ‘New Gate’, which was one of six entrances into the old walled town. The name is misleading because the gate was probably no newer than any of the others leading through the town wall. 

The New Gate was first recorded in 1456 when the town council decided that it had to be completed, which implies that it had been started sometime earlier. The Gate probably took its name from New Street which passed through it. New Street itself is likely to have been created as a direct replacement of Millwall Place; this was blocked when the town defences (Mill Wall) were cut across its line, perhaps during the 14th century. 

Little is known about the form of the gate but there is one painting of it dating to about 1720. Here it appears as a tower, probably made of timber, which was tarred or painted black. It had a central passageway and a pitched roof, perhaps of tile. 

The Delf Stream 

One of the functions of New Gate was probably to guard and maintain the all-important Delf Stream, which runs alongside New Street. The Delf is an artificial watercourse that brought fresh drinking water into the medieval town from a source around 3km (1.9 miles) away. It entered the town through New Gate, although the channel was constructed much earlier. It was first mentioned in a document dated 1152-67 and may have been built by the monks of Christ Church Priory in Canterbury, who had extensive property in the town. The stream was used for drinking water until 1894, when piped water was installed in Sandwich. 

As the Delf mostly consisted of an open, unprotected channel, pollution was always a big problem. There were strict laws about where to water animals and wash clothes. Houses by the stream were ordered to glaze their windows, an expensive luxury at the time, to stop rubbish being thrown into the stream. A number of timber and stone bridges were constructed to carry town traffic across the Delf 

Woodnesborough Gate 

Fronted by a wet ditch, the medieval town rampart continues from here to the old Woodnesborough Gate as an earthen embankment. This was later to become known as the ‘Rope Walk’. Not far from the site of Woodnesborough Gate in 1980, an archaeological trench was cut through the thickness of the rampart, on the line of a proposed new sewer. This confirmed that the bank was composed of sterile dumped clay and was more than 12 metres (40 feet) wide at the base. 

There may have been a defensive wooden palisade (a fence made of pales or stakes) along the summit of the bank. After this was removed, the flat top of the clay rampart was used for making ships’ rope. This needed a long, straight stretch for ‘walking-out’, where the strands of the rope were braided and made taut. At more than 350 metres (0.2 miles) long, this section of the old town rampart was ideal 

Around New Street 

Further down New Street, on the opposite side of the road just past the junction with Galliard Street, is a 17th-century house called Whitefriars, which fronts onto New Street. This was built in the grounds of a former medieval Friary of the Carmelites (White Friars). The friary was closed during the Reformation under Henry VIII in 1538 and was later demolished. Its site is now occupied by a modern housing estate. 

Thomas Paine lived and worked as a staymaker (corset maker) in New Street between 1759 and 1760, before he wrote his political pamphlets which influenced both the French and American Revolutions. After the War of American Independence, he helped to write the American Constitution of 1787 and he later became a member of the French government