Why kingston is the capital of jamaica

NHA — Dr. Elizabeth Ward. House Matters — November 11, Get the facts. World Tsunami Awareness Day. Geographical Location Kingston is located on the south-eastern end of the island of Jamaica. It was renamed the St. William Grant Park in , after the noted labour leader and Black Nationalist. Today, as a terminus for buses coming from all over the island, Parade is still perhaps the busiest centre of activity in Kingston.

Cross Roads was formerly known as Montgomery Corner, after a Lieutenant Montgomery who was allegedly thrown by his horse and dragged to that spot where he died. A clock tower, erected to the memory of servicemen from Kingston and St. Kingston Harbour , the seventh largest harbour in the world, is considered one of the finest anchorages. Jamaica Information Service. I Tel: 1 1 Email: Send us your query. The eyewitness reports still make shocking reading today.

So much sand was washed away that Port Royal in effect became a tiny desert island. Roughly 2, people were killed, with thousands more succumbing to disease soon after. In a few seismic seconds, as the watch fell from a pocket and stopped, the fortunes of Port Royal changed for ever. Ideas for a deliberately different kind of town took hold: a gridiron plan designed to suit the white, colonial, slave-trading and slave-holding elite — and to underscore its control of people and space.

The main thoroughfares, wider than the rest at 66ft, formed free-flowing transport routes between the port and plantations in the hinterland, while plots were oriented to maximise the number of frontages available in prime commercial areas. In the years following the earthquake, Port Royal was also rebuilt along the same lines as before, albeit to half its previous size, and in the late s its crammed and crooked streets remained a more desirable place to live than the town taking shape across the water.

But Port Royal was to suffer its own great fire just 10 years after the earthquake. An act was swiftly drawn up to prohibit the resettling of Port Royal and to move all its inhabitants to Kingston, sparking a heated transatlantic debate between Jamaica and England over the relative advantages of each site.

Placating the colonists, London eventually resolved that both towns should be allowed to continue, with Port Royal serving as the outermost defence for Kingston and the wider island.

If Port Royal had meaning by association with the restored ancient City of London, the design of colonial Kingston has more in common with unused proposals for rebuilding London that envisioned an entirely new city. The development of that grid was overseen by the military engineer Christian Lilly. Kingston was declared the official capital of the Colony of Jamaica in In Kingston was struck by an earthquake that killed over people and destroyed nearly all of the buildings in the center of the city.

That quake led to a three-story height restriction on all central business district structures and the requirement that they be built in reinforced concrete. By the s Kingston residents formed a trade union movement that eventually became the driving force in the Jamaican independence campaign. In the city became the site of the Mona Campus of the University of West Indies , the first institution of higher learning in Jamaica.

When independence came in , Kingston remained the capital of the new nation. At the time its population was estimated at ,