History of Orpington
| Published: 24th April 2008 21:13 |
Orpington High Street
The history of the Orpington goes all the way back to the Stone Age and contemporary tools have been found at sites on Goddington Park, Priory Gardens, Ramsden Estate and Poverest. There is also evidence of Bronze Age pottery in the Park Avenue area and an Iron Age farmstead was discovered during thre bulding of the Ramsden Boys School in the fifties. The Roman influence can be seen at the Crofton Roman Villa on Crofton Road. According to Wikipedia the name Orpington appears in 1032 when it was known as Orpedingetune and indeed the Orpington Parish Church itself pre-dates the Domesday Book.
Evidence of Medieval settlement can be seen in the Priory, its outbuildings and walls. Nowadays this is the Bromley Museum which hosts a number of events and exhibitions throughout the year free for members of the public.
Orpington War Memorial
Until quite recently, the larger commercial and industrial centre in this area was St Mary Cray which had a foundry, factories, a paper mill and whose high street was much longer than Orpington's. When the railways came Orpington's existence as a sleepy country village was to change until the point today when it is the second largest town in the Borough.
Orpington is also synonymous with travellers and the Romani. There was the first meeting of the International Romany Union in Orpington in the seventies and local MP, Eric Lubbock, supported a bill in the late sixties to provide permanent Gypsy sites which obliged local authorities to provide areas for locally residing travellers. To this day the St Mary Cray part of Orpington still has the largest population of settled travellers in the UK.
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