Purfleet In The Past

A Memory of Purfleet.

The Royal Hotel was one of the "whitebait inns" which drew custom down-river from London in the nineteenth century. In both World Wars Purfleet was a transit camp for thousands of soldiers waiting to be shipped abroad from Tilbury docks. The Essex shore was called the Erith Rands. Rand was Anglo-saxon for border or Edge. At Purfleet, in medieval times Pilgrims on their way to Canterbury crossed to the Kent shore by a ferry at the Mermaid Causeway. Even earlier subterranean caves in the chalk cliffs neaby were used by the Danes. Including a tunnel which extended a mile under the Thames.
On top of the cliffs there used to be a lighthouse, and before that there was a Limeburning Industry. In the 1940s a margerine factory and a Cement works and a paper mill operated in this area. An Illuminated Tidal Guage was erected in 1924 for the use of Thames Pilots when they guided ships between the Docks up & down the Thames River.