Old Kent Road Old Kent Road Old Kent Road is a major thoroughfare in South East London, England, passing through the London Borough of Southwark. It was originally part of an ancient trackway that was paved by the Romans and used by the Anglo-Saxons who named it Wæcelinga Stræt (Watling Street). It is now part of the A2, a major road from London to Dover. The road was important in Roman times linking London to the coast at Richborough and Dover via Canterbury. It was a route for pilgrims in the Middle Ages as portrayed in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, when Old Kent Road
Wot Cher! Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road the chorus moves into the relative major. It was sung and danced to by Shirley Temple and Arthur Treacher in the 1939 film "The Little Princess". The song is full of working class cockney rhyming slang and idiomatic phrasing. The song tells the story of a family who live in an alley, a passageway off the street usually lined with crowded tenements, near the Old Kent Road, one of the poorest districts in London. They are visited by a toff, a well-dressed man, who must have been a gentleman because he took his topper (tophat) off in the presence of