Major Highways of Britain: The A2 Quiz

Answer: The Rose Theatre

The Rose was built in 1587 by Philip Henslowe, an Elizabethan theatrical entrepreneur and impresario, and a grocer named John Cholmley. It was the first theatre to be built in the Southwark area, and its success attracted other theatres to the area. However the competition from the larger Globe Theatre and a large increase in rent brought about the demise of the Rose in about 1606.

The three incorrect answer options were all theatres in other areas of London at the same time.

Answer: Watling Street

The road became known as Watling Street, perhaps derived from the Old English Wæcelinga Stræt and associated with a small tribe in the St Albans area called the Waeclingas. Some of the present-day A2 is officially named Watling Street, for example a long stretch near Gravesend.

Answer: Bluewater

Bluewater Shopping Centre opened in 1999 on a 240 acre site in an old chalk quarry; it cost £400 million to build. It's the fifth-largest shopping precinct in the UK with a sales floor area on over a million-and-a-half square feet and parking for 13,000 vehicles. John Lewis, House of Fraser and Marks & Spencer all have large stores there.

Answer: Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens first saw Gads Hill Place when he was nine years old; his father told him that if he worked hard enough then one day he would own it or another just like it. Dickens would often walk from his home in Chatham to Gads Hill as the house seemed to inspire him - he later wrote "I used to look at it as a wonderful Mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child with the first faint shadows of all my books in my head".

After Dickens had risen to fame and fortune some 35 years later he bought the house, taking up residence in 1857 and dying there in 1870.

His family was eventually forced to sell the house, and for the last hundred years it's been a school. All the authors given as incorrect answer options lived well into the 20th Century.

Answer: Borstal

What became known as the Borstal system was devised in the mid-1890s as an attempt to separate young people from older convicts in adult prisons. Youth detention centres, or Borstals as they came to be known, were run by HM Prison Service and were intended to reform young offenders.

The court sentence was officially called "borstal training". Borstals were originally for offenders under 21, but in the 1930s the maximum age was increased to 23. The borstal system was abolished by the Criminal Justice Act 1982 when borstals were replaced with youth custody centres.

Answer: An early Neolithic tomb

Kits Coty House is the remains of a chambered long barrow. It was constructed in the early Neolithic period about 4000 BCE, the dawning of the age of agriculture in the British Isles and the first period in which people built monumental structures such as these. All that remains of the tomb are three large stones with a horizontal capstone surmounting them.

It's one of a number of such structures in the area, referred to as the Medway Megaliths.

Answer: A Royal Navy Dockyard

Hundreds of ships were built and many thousands refitted at the Royal Navy Dockyard at Chatham during the four hundred year period in which it was in operation. Among many famous ships that the Dockyard produced was HMS Victory, the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission.

The Chatham Naval Memorial commemorates the 18,500 Royal Navy sailors who were lost in World Wars One and Two. Since its closure much of the Dockyard has been converted to a museum; its collection of artifacts from the Age of Sail is possibly the most comprehensive in the world.

Answer: Fog caused a 130 vehicle pile-up on the bridge

Sheppey, being marshy and low-lying, is prone to fog. On the morning in question patchy dense fog completely blinded many drivers, with the result that multiple collisions took place. Fortunately nobody was killed.

Answer: Oysters

Native oysters, Ostria edulis, were farmed and harvested at Whitsable from Roman times onwards, and by the mid-19th century as many as 80 million a year were being produced. Sadly a combination of pollution, disease and overfishing wiped out the native oysters in the mid-20th century; since then Pacific oysters, Magallana gigas, have been farmed instead. Happily, the annual Whitstable Oyster Festival still takes place during the summer.

Answer: It's the oldest continuously operating school in the world

The King's School is not only Britain's oldest public school, it's arguably the oldest continuously operating school in the world: education on the Abbey and Cathedral site has been uninterrupted since when it was founded by Saint Augustine in AD 597. It is also the oldest choir school in the world.
Coincidentally, The King's School in Rochester (same name but different institution) is probably the second oldest continuously operating school in the world, having been founded only a few years later in AD 604.
Looking at the incorrect answer options, 20 out of the UK's 57 Prime Ministers have been educated at Eton (hence the phrase "Eton Mess"?). In terms of the costliest school, the fees at the UK's most expensive private school, Brighton College, are up to £64,920 a year at the time this quiz was written. Finally in terms of academic performance the North London Collegiate School, a private day school for girls in Edgware, has been placed in the top two in the "Daily Telegraph" exam results league table every year for over a decade, topping the table in 2023.

Answer: The North Downs

The late Cretaceous chalk White Cliffs of Dover are the eastern end of the North Downs. Millennia ago what is now Kent was covered by a thick dome of this chalk, but the top of the dome eroded leaving behind a northern and a southern escarpment - the North and South Downs respectively - with the heavily wooded clay and greensand area now known as the Weald in the middle.

The South Downs meet the sea at Beachy Head, some 75 miles to the west.

Answer: Louis Blériot

French aviation pioneer Louis Blériot claimed a £1,000 prize from the "Daily Mail" when he completed the first powered flight over the English Channel on 25 July 1909. Setting off from the French coast near Calais at 4.15 am with no compass, he flew at an altitude of about 250 feet and at a speed of about 45 mph. Thirty-six minutes later he made a "pancake" landing on a field by Dover Castle.

He is commemorated by the Blériot Memorial, which takes the form of an outline of his aircraft laid out in granite setts in the grass. Looking at the incorrect answer options, Orville Wright made the first-ever powered flight in 1903, Charles Lindbergh made the first-ever solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, and Jacques Charles, along with Nicolas-Louis Robert, made the first ascent in a hydrogen balloon in 1783, just ten days after the first-ever manned free balloon flight.

Answer: A lighthouse

The remains of the Roman lighthouse or pharos are spectacular; the structure stands 52 feet high, of which the bottom 41 feet are Roman. It was built in the early 2nd Century CE, one of a pair designed to guide ships into Dover harbour; the remains of the second about a mile away have more-or-less vanished.

The lighthouse was also designed so that it could communicate with another lighthouse situated at Cape Gris Nez on the French coast. Many years later the 10th Century Church of Saint Mary in Castro was built beside it, and the lighthouse was used as a bell tower for the church.

Answer: Captain Matthew Webb

Captain Matthew Webb (1848 - 1883) was a Merchant Navy officer who became a swimmer and stuntman. He first came to public attention by diving into the sea in mid-Atlantic in an attempt to rescue a seaman; as a result of this he became the first recipient of the Stanhope Medal, the Royal Humane Society's award for the most courageous and heroic rescue. In 1873 he decided to be the first person to swim the English Channel, and after much training and preparation he accomplished this feat in 1875, becoming the first swimmer to complete a cross-Channel swim without artificial aids such as flotation devices, etc. Following his achievement he became a professional swimmer, but sadly he perished when he attempted a swim across the Whirlpool Rapids on the Niagara River below Niagara Falls in 1883.
Poet Laureate John Betjeman wrote a lovely poem about Captain Webb entitled "A Shropshire Lad" (not to be confused with the identically-titled work by A. E. Housman), and there's a nice recording of Betjeman reciting it to an orchestral backing by Jim Parker on YouTube - it's well worth a listen!
Looking at the incorrect answer options, in 2021 Neil Agius took 52 hours to swim 78 miles in the Mediterranean Sea from Linosa to Gozo, Charles Ziberman swam 145 miles in 148 hours in 1937 down the Hudson River from Albany to New York, and in 2019 Sarah Thomas swam the English Channel four times, swimming 83 miles in 54 hours.

Answer: 72 miles

From London to Dover is a 72 mile trip by road on the A2 - a drive of about an hour-and-a-half. The fastest train takes about an hour and ten minutes.