Borstal, Rochester

Borstal is a place in the unitary authority of Medway in South East England. Originally a village near Rochester, it has become absorbed by the expansion of Rochester. The youth prison at Borstal gave its name to the Borstal reform school system.HistoryIts name came from Anglo-Saxon burg-steall "fort site" or "place of refuge", likely referring to the hill there. The hill is now the home to Fort Borstal. However, local resident Donald Maxwell argued that a 'borstal' was "a track up a chalk hill", claiming to have heard local farmers use the term in this way.The village is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Borchetelle, and then consisted of a 50-acre meadow, six households and two watermills. By 1769 this riverside farm was called Bostle, and probably had been joined by a wayside inn called the White Horse on the valley road above. In about 1830 Borstal House was built near the farm, and at the time of the 1840s Tithe Map the settlement was just a hamlet of a few cottages, mostly owned by local woman Mary Tuff. She sold her nearby lime-works in 1853, which was developed into a cement factory owned from 1864 by London solicitor Samuel Barker Booth. Its success led to the hamlet's growth into a village of terraced houses with two new pubs, shops and a workmen's institute. A second cement factory, called Borstal Manor, opened in 1898 near the original Domesday settlement. Both works closed in 1900, but continued to produce cement intermittently until about 1920. The village went into a decline when its factories closed, but underwent a resurgence of new house-building in the 1930s, when it became a suburb of Rochester. Borstal House, by then renamed Borstal Manor, was demolished in about 1960. The western end of the Domesday meadow is now crossed by the M2 motorway and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The rest of it has been built on.