page_title: Rochester, Kent
section_title: Governance
hierarchical_section_title: Rochester, Kent / Governance
caption_attribution_description: English: Attrib: Clem Rutter, Rochester.
context_page_description: Rochester is a town and was a historic city in the unitary authority of Medway in Kent, England. It is at the lowest bridging point of the River Medway about 30 miles from London.
  Rochester was for many years a favourite of Charles Dickens, who owned nearby Gads Hill Place, Higham, basing many of his novels on the area. The Diocese of Rochester, the second oldest in England, is centred on Rochester Cathedral and was responsible for the founding of a school, now The King's School in 604 AD, which is recognised as being the second oldest continuously running school in the world. Rochester Castle, built by Bishop Gundulf of Rochester, has one of the best preserved keeps in either England or France, and during the First Barons' War in King John's reign, baronial forces captured the castle from Archbishop Stephen Langton and held it against the king, who then besieged it.
  Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham, Strood and a number of outlying villages form a single large urban area known as the Medway Towns with a population of about 250,000. These places nowadays make up the Medway Unitary Authority area.
context_section_description: On 1 April 1974, the City Council was abolished under the Local Government Act 1972, and the territory was merged with the District of Medway, Borough of Chatham and most of Strood Rural District, including the parishes of Cuxton, Halling and Cliffe, and the Hoo Peninsula, to form a new a local government district called the Borough of Medway, within the county of Kent. Medway Borough Council applied to inherit Rochester's city status, but this was refused; instead letters patent were granted constituting the area of the former Rochester local government district to be the City of Rochester, to "perpetuate the ancient name" and to recall "the long history and proud heritage of the said City". The Home Office said that the city status may be extended to the entire borough if it had "Rochester" in its name, so in 1979, Medway Borough Council renamed the borough to Borough of Rochester-upon-Medway, and in 1982, Rochester's city status was transferred to the entire borough by letters patent, with the district being called the City of Rochester-upon-Medway. The Admiral of the River Medway was ex-officio Mayor of Rochester and this dignity transferred to the Mayor of Medway when that unitary authority was created, along with the Admiralty Court for the River which constitutes a committee of the Council.
  On 1 April 1998, the existing local government districts of Rochester-upon-Medway and Gillingham were abolished and became the new unitary authority of Medway. The Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions informed the city council that since it was the local government district that officially held City status under the 1982 Letters Patent, the council would need to appoint charter trustees to preserve its city status, but the outgoing Labour-run council decided not to appoint "Charter Trustees", so the city status was lost when Rochester-upon-Medway was abolished as a local government district. The other local government districts with City status that were abolished around this time, Bath and Hereford, decided to appoint Charter Trustees to maintain the existence of their own cities and the mayoralties. The incoming Medway Council apparently only became aware of this when, in 2002, it was advised that Rochester was not on the Lord Chancellor's Office's list of cities.
  In 2010, Medway Council started to refer to the "City of Medway" in promotional material, but it was rebuked and instructed not to do so in future by the Advertising Standards Authority. Subsequently, the Medway Unitary Authority has applied for City status for Medway as a whole, rather than merely for Rochester. Medway applied unsuccessfully for City status in 2000 and 2002 and again in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Year of 2012. Any future bid to regain formal City status has been recommended to be made under the aegis of Rochester-upon-Medway.
  The 2011 definition of Rochester includes Strood to the northwest and is defined as an urban subdivision with a 2011 population of 62,982.
  Kelly Tolhurst MP is the current parliamentary representative for the constituency.
caption: The Guildhall, Rochester
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