When Sue arrived at Eastgate House to do some work one very wet day, the receptacle for her umbrella was a plastic bucket. Oh dear! Not quite what one would expect in the entrance hall of a Grade 1 listed town house. The answer, of course, was an umbrella stand, so on a trip along the High Street, one of the antique shops had just the job. After checking with the committee that they were happy to buy it, Sue did just that and now we have an umbrella stand in the entrance hall. If anyone has a small cut-in-half-wooden-barrel type of receptacle, this would also be useful for the telescopic umbrellas that many of us have these days.
If you know where one is please email info@friendsofeastgatehouse.org with location and cost, and we will investigate.

Before we forget all about Christmas and the Christmas Market in Rochester, and the Dickens Ball, I thought I would update you on the results of the stalls we had on the first and third weekend of the markets, and the raffle I organised at the Dickens Mistletoe Ball.​

Former Rochester resident, Michael Harris visited Eastgate House on Saturday 27 October 2018.  He now lives in Nashville, Tennessee and was visiting his sister who now lives in Rainham. She attended the Medway College of Art, and later, exhibited some of her paintings at Eastgate when it was an exhibition space.

Mike said 'My earliest memories of Eastgate House date back to when I was a pupil at The King’s School in Rochester.  One of our teachers took the class to visit it, probably around 1960, as we were reading excerpts from Dickens’ ‘Pickwick Papers’ in our English class.