page_title: Cliffe, Kent
section_title: Victorian Cliffe
hierarchical_section_title: Cliffe, Kent / Victorian Cliffe
caption_attribution_description: English: An Arriva bus waiting to depart for Chatham. This was the 11:30 am service that was about to depart from the Six Bells stop at Cliffe to call at Strood and Rochester on the way. Behind the bus is the tower of St Helen’s church. It is a grade 1 listed building dating from the 12th century. It was remodelled in the early 14th century and the chancel, tower and transepts were restored in the 19th century
context_page_description: Cliffe is a village on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, England, reached from the Medway Towns by a three-mile journey along the B2000 road. Situated upon a low chalk escarpment overlooking the Thames marshes, Cliffe offers views of Southend-on-Sea and London. It forms part of the parish of Cliffe and Cliffe Woods in the borough of Medway. The population of the village is included in the civil parish of Cliffe and Cliffe Woods. In 774 Offa, King of Mercia, built a rustic wooden church dedicated to St Helen, a popular Mercian saint who was by legend the daughter of Coel of Colchester. Cliffe is cited in early records as having been called Clive and Cliffe-at-Hoo.
context_section_description: The rise of the Kent cement industry brought a new prosperity to the ancient settlement during the Victorian era.
  Alfred Francis (second son of Charles), with his son, established the firm of Francis and Co. at the Nine Elms office at Vauxhall, London, and then built the cement works at Cliffe in about 1860. Francis and Co instituted the Nine Elms cement works . These works were built on Cliffe marsh, to the west of the village where the chalk cliffs came almost to within a mile of the River Thames. The area also proved a useful source of clay.
  Alfred Francis died in 1871, but in partnership his son continued to produce "Portland, Roman, Medina and Parian cement, Portland stucco and Plaster of Paris", also shipping chalk, flints and fire bricks, from the site.
  The riverside location provided ease of transport and wharves were duly built at the mouth of Cliffe creek. A canal was constructed from the works, which gave its name to a tavern built nearby, now long demolished but remembered as the Canal Tavern.
  1870–71 saw further developments to the cement works, which were rebuilt and extended, with an elaborate tramway added. Methods of extracting the chalk were basic, involving the labourer being suspended by a rope (around his waist) secured at the cliff top, from which position he would hack out the chalk, so that it fell to the ground below to be collected in a waiting railway wagon.
  Further to the north of the Francis and Company works near the river, an explosive works (Curtis and Harvey) opened in 1901. Over the factory's 20-year history, 16 people were to lose their lives in explosions.
  Francis and Company was taken over about 1900 by the British Portland Cement Company, but after the Great War the cement works began to decline, and was finally phased out in 1920–21.
  By 1901 the population of Cliffe exceeded 3,000.
caption: Arriva Medway Towns Plaxton Pointer 2 bodied Dennis Dart SLF outside the Six Bells pub in April 2014
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