Photo credit: Jan Pedersen
Photo credit: Jan Pedersen
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Cheriton Road - the road itself
There appears to be very little information regarding the actual road Cheriton Road pre-1900, certainly in the environs of the current football ground. Maps in the late 1800s show Cheriton Road within the built up extent of Folkestone (approximately the current Central Station) as a surfaced road. similarly within the village of Cheriton, Cheriton Road appears well established. However in the vicinity of Braodmead Farm the road is shown dotted. Does this imply that it was possibly only a track, and maybe not surfaced. For example it appears this way in 1872:-
Picture credit: Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Use of these digitised maps for non-commercial purposes is permitted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA) licence.
In modern times this road is the A2034 and the numbering was born out of the changes to the A20.. The A20 originally ended in Folkestone. It went along Cheriton High Street, then Cheriton Road, right into the town centre where it met the A259, which continued to Dover. However, by 1955 it was realised that most traffic along this route to Dover came via London and Maidstone, so the A20 took over the route to Dover, partly in consequence of the building of a new Folkestone bypass which went via Cherry Garden and Churchill Avenues. The bit of Cheriton Road left over became the A2034.
What can be recorded about the history of a road? It's the things that grow up either side of it that create the history, isn't it? Well things do happen on this road that make recordable history.
Here's a great picture of the carnival, led by the Folkestone Nicholson Pipes band going along the road in 1953 to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II:-
Picture credit: Patricia Rivers
Not much changed for this stretch of Cheriton Road for many years. However in 2024 the road itself was considerably narrowed creating enormous pavements / cycle paths on either side of the road. The consultation documentation showed many objections to this happening, but it happened anyway. If cars are parked on either side of the road (there are no double yellow lines) then the passing traffic is severely restricted.How many people will be walking down here? Maybe it's a "build it and they will come"? Let's hope in the future these pavements see hordes of sports fans heading towards the Cheriton Road sports facilities.
Photo credit: Duncan Saunders