Marlowe's Childhood

The Marlowes' House?

The Marlowe family house where Christopher entered the world was supposedly located on the south side of St George's Street close to the eastern gate in the city walls, across from the church of St George the Martyr where he was baptised on 26 February 1564.

Specifically, tradition records it to be the house on the south-east corner with St George's Lane, at what had become number 57 St George's Street by the nineteenth century (opposite the Coach & Horses pub from at least 1871). There is no extant documentary evidence to prove that this was the Marlowe abode, however. Like many other properties in the neighbourhood, it was completely destroyed during the German Luftwaffe bombing raid on 01 June 1942 that also accounted for the majority of the church.

Some photographs survive of the house before its destruction and are shown below. The following detail from a 1640 street map of Canterbury shows the same layout of roads as that found in 1942.

John Bakeless had visited Canterbury whilst the house still stood to research2 his biography of Marlowe, published in 1937, in which he described the house as follows:3

"The home that John and Katherine Marlowe established after their marriage in 1561 was the average Elizabethan tradesman's house. The house, which immemorial Canterbury describes as 'Marlowe's birthplace', still stands at the corner of St George's Street and little St George's Lane. There is some doubt whether all the modern house belonged to John Marlowe, the tanner. According to tradition, there were once gardens in front of the house, which now abuts directly on the street; and one can see clearly that the front of the house was added to an even older rear structure, centuries ago. There is even a vague story that the Marlowes did not live in this particular house but in another, since destroyed, a few yards eastward nearer to the city wall."4

It seems that William Urry (1913-81), the archivist, Canterbury historian and author of Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury may have shared this scepticism. His view on the belief that the house at No. 57 St George's St belonged to the Marlowes was that it was "an unfounded invention of the later nineteenth century at a time when a scheme for a Marlowe memorial was being promoted, and the need for a 'birthplace' became insistent".5

Bakeless, though, finds the story plausible, and goes on to note that many locals believed it to be the Marlowe abode, to the extent that some contents from the property were taken to be used as Marlowe memorabilia:

"At any rate the locale is right; the house is unquestionably of the period; and it is reasonable enough to suppose that the birthplace is authentic, for traditions linger firmly in Canterbury, and local interest in Marlowe's life had begun among Kentish antiquarians while the poet's father and mother were still alive. The house was probably already being pointed out to strangers, even while John and Katherine Marlowe still dwelt near it in the adjoining parish of St Mary Bredman."

"John Marlowe's was only a tradesman's dwelling in those spacious days, but by modern standards it was a fairly large house - large enough to accommodate half of an ambitious furniture store to-day - and its carved panelling was so beautiful that two of its rooms have been removed wholesale to provide a 'Marlowe bedroom' for one of the modern Kentish gentry and a panelled dining-room for another, while the original old dining-room has been used to panel a display room for a Canterbury antique dealer. Round the upper part of the panelling of the various rooms ran friezes of intricate and beautiful carved patterns. One of the fireplaces had a huge carved mantel of red pine. As the centuries passed, later and unappreciative owners painted the carving over until it became almost a plane surface. One miscreant even stained and grained it to imitate mahogany!"

"Outside, the whole house must have been very like its one early Tudor wall, which still remains unchanged and unspoiled, facing on St George's Lane. Heavy oaken timbers rose half-way up the first story. The second story overhung the lane, thriftily adding space for the numerous bedrooms of the shoemaker's rapidly growing family; and the overhang was supported by oaken braces, elaborately carved as heads and busts of grotesque creatures. To-day, blackened by the passing years, they seem more Mayan than Elizabethan."

The house at No. 57 St George's Street can also just be seen hidden away on a postcard view down St George's Street from the late Victorian or Edwardian period:

Nowadays, the site of the house is occupied by the Fenwick department store, adjacent to the Whitefriars Shopping Centre. Previously, Ricemans store had been built in the 1960s, but was purchased in 1986 by the Fenwick Group. In 2003, the store was demolished and rebuilt (along with the shopping centre), and rebranded as Fenwick. The modern department store stretches from south-west of the surviving church tower and eastwards to close to where the old city wall stood, over the site of the original St George's Lane which is no longer. Instead, the modern bus station can be found on a newly developed St George's Lane, dividing off into St George's Terrace, running south between what would have been the city wall to the east and the new Fenwick store to the west.9