Kingston is a city
that was born from calamity. It was the heir of the robust and wild city of
Port Royal, a city at the hub of marine life, stuck out on a long peninsular
arm to embrace the enormous natural harbour. One of the major event cities
within the hemisphere, Port Royal was garishly coloured by the licence that the
aggressive nature of the entrepreneurial spirit nourishes itself with when law
is distant and difficult to administer. The stories of that wild spirit abound
-of Sir Henry Morgan- whose piracy was even institutionalised and used by the
English, against their rivals the Spanish.
But in 1692 the
city of Port Royal was swallowed, an apocalyptic act of retribution- in an
earthquake. At the time the story was a global skoop with a description of the
event, translated into every major language. A new era in the history of
Jamaica was about to begin, one where the primary focus was not the sea and its
fluid tendency to erase the lines of order imposed upon it: but the land.
Within this era of consolodation Port Royal reverted to a more specialised
function, a marine base, a function it has kept to the present.
The parish of St.
Andrews had already been divided up among the soldiers who had helped expel the
Spanish in Modyford‘s expedition to Spanish Town. Col. Barry, one of them had,
however sold his lands to Sir William Beeston who had arrived in Kingston five
years after the conquest of Jamaica in 1660. After the destruction of Port
Royal he sold 200 acres of his land for £ 1,000. That land was neatly divided
by John Goffe into a very nicely modulated grid suffused with the aesthetics of
manifest order.
The west of the
slightly elongated parallelogram was bound by West street, the east by East
street, the south by the memory and view of Kingston’s predecessor: Port Royal
Street of which it gave a view and to the North by North Street. That is the kind
of grid that is very neat and pleasing, filled with self-evidence and
reminiscent of the neat orthogonal disposition of the Egyptian pyramids and
subject to the same geographical geometry. If the nile goes from the south to
the north, Jamaica, as an island is elongated exactly according to the East
West axis. That satisfaction in the plan continues in its further division
directly inspired on the military aesthetics of Roman *** and ultimately of
Hippodamuss’ plan
of *
The main street,
King Street, slightly wider than the others, dissected the parallelogram from
south to north, expressing the economical interface between land and sea. It
passes through a square at dead centre, a military camp called the parade and
is intersected at that point by an aesthetically and symbolically motivated
East-West street, which, to give expression to the machinations of dynastic
perpetuity, was called Queen street: the royalist credentials of the city Kingston were engraved through its heart
even though the conquest of Jamaica had initially been inspired by Cromwells’
Grand Design. The subsidiary streets memorised early notables including Beeston
himself, Beckford, whose descendents we shall come across a century later and
even rubs off reminicesces of
In the middle of
the square, which was an exact square true to its name, was a cistern, water
being the main medium of urban possibility.
What is particularly subtle about the plan and has a similarly
symbolical and ideological significance is the way that Kingston Parish Church
was the only building to penetrate the square, disrupting its geometry in an
act of righteous religious assertion. An act prophetic after the fact, as
religion is one of the mainstays of Jamaican life, an extrarodinary force
penetrating to the very heart of its existence.
The rest of the
parcels of land were carefully modulated, giving expression to anticipation of
the value of land with regard to its location, two rows of smaller parcels near
the harbour, then two rows of slightly longer parallelograms, succeded by a
single row of attentuated plots which broder the parade to the south. The
Parade itself, because of the necessity of symbolic disection, by queenstreet,
gives slightly smaller plots to the East and West.
But below the rich
symbolical language of the grid lay the cruder game of land speculation. Sir
william Beeton, already wealthy, became exceedingly rich and played the games
of extortion to perfection when he returned to the island in 1693 as Governor
from a sojourn in England. He declared the initial sale of land illegal,
reposessed the 809 lots and resold them for £ 5 pounds each, a near 500%
increase on the initial price, all the while ensured of a future security by
the fact he already owned 330 acres of land surrounding the city.[1]
[1] Anthony Johnson,