Nestled north of the River Medway and north of Strood, knitted into the fabric of the conurbation of the Medway Towns - sits the urban locale of Frindsbury, in Kent. With evidence of its prehistory origins stretching back thousands of years, Frindsbury is one of the oldest locales in the Medway Towns. Contemporarily it is considered a suburb of Rochester, rather than its own separate locality. The built environment of Frindsbury reflects its contemporary developments, as many houses are 20th and 21st century suburban new builds, with a scattering of semi-detached and terraced townhouse properties throughout!

Although now considered a suburb of Rochester historically Frindsbury was always separated. Compared to Rochester, Frindsbury’s prehistory is jaw-droppingly long. In archaeological excavations from 1915, researchers discovered the skeletal remains of the since long extinct straight-tusked elephant (palaeoloxodon antiquus), dated from the Lower to Middle Palaeolithic era - which could be up to 500,000 years ago! As recently as 2023, archaeologists from University College London excavated Ice Age tools, such as hand-axes, dug from the earth at Frindsbury, dated over 300,000 years ago! This means that there has been settlement in the Frindsbury locale thousands and thousands of years before the wheel was invented, or before the first towns in Mesopotamia and the wider Middle East were created!

The archaeological evidence found in Frindsbury is largely helped by the long-standing industrious tradition of chalk quarrying that dominated Frindsbury’s trade economy for most of its inception. In fact, many houses in the Frindsbury locale are built on top of a disused chalk mine!

Frindsbury is part of the urban fabric that connects the adjoining Medway Towns together - and therefore has long remained an idealised and sought after locale in the Medway region. Owing to this, Medway council has often focused on Frindsbury as an area for infrastructural and housing development - despite the small patch of conservation looped around the medieval manor house. Whilst Medway Council is currently drafting its local plan for the period up to 2041 - which will denote how much infrastructural development will occur in Frindsbury, in 2021 the council approved the building of over 180 homes and a new secondary school in Frindsbury!