John Thorpe (1715-1792), one of the greatest of Kentish antiquaries, was the son of a Rochester physician who devoted his leisure to the history of the diocese of Rochester. On his death in 1750 his son undertook to edit and publish a number of transcripts made from him from the registers and ancient deeds and muniments of the cathedral and other repositories. This resulted in the appearance in 1769 of the first of John Thorpe's great works, the Registrum Roffense, in which are preserved the fruits of his fathers many years of research. Twenty years later, in 1788, he published his second major work, his Custumale Roffense, a transcription of a manuscript in the archives of the Cathedral at Rochester, to which he added further information on the institutions whose records had been subject of the Registrum.
Thorpe produced these books while living in Bexley. Having bough High Street House from the Austens, he rebuilt it and lived there until after his first wife's death in 1789, when he moved to Chippenham, in Wiltshire. Where he died in 1792 at the age of 77. In addition to his major works, he wrote articles for the Gentlemen's Magazine and accounts of several antiquities of Kent, published in Nichols' Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica (1790). One of his daughters, Catherine, provided him with drawings of some of the buildings he described. These were used for illustrations in his publishes works. They include two elevations of the old parsonage house at Bexley, demolished in 1776, of which otherwise nothing would be known.
Historians and archaeologists still value Thorpe's writings and Bexley should be proud both of its association with him and of the fine house he built there.