Medway, She Wrote

  • Done: Deal – A handy guide to this beautiful seaside town

    “Sunny and bracing.”

    “It’s definitely sunny and bracing,” I said – or rather shouted – to the Man of Kent, as we walked along Deal pier, being shunted this way and that by the wind, cheeks buffed pink and noses streaming. On our left, iron grey storm clouds loomed ominously over the town; to the right, jewel-blue skies and bright March sunshine. It was almost all the weather all at once – or as some might say, a typical Spring day in England.

    We were in Deal to celebrate our anniversary. The weather was nippy on the Kent coast that weekend, but tropical compared to our wedding day in Northumberland eleven years ago, when the temperature was zero degrees Celsius and half the country was covered in snow. The conditions were a bit of a shock for the Southern contingent of wedding guests, who were not comforted by locals telling them that, “This time last year it was 20 degrees here.” We hold The Man of Kent’s Dad partly responsible for the arctic wedding weather. Upon being informed that we had set a date for March, he nodded and gravely remarked, “It has been known to snow in March.” Fate clearly heard that temptation, and couldn’t resist. On every wedding anniversary since, we’ve done something special to mark the occasion, regardless of weather.

    Deal is one of the prettiest seaside towns in Kent. It was once a fortified cinque port, an important part of England’s defences against invasion, and a favoured haunt of smugglers. Nowadays, it’s home to quirky independent shops, excellent restaurants and pubs, and a handful of unusual museums. There’s enough things to do to fill a couple of days, but not so many that you feel like you have to rush to cram everything in, making it ideal for a weekend getaway. Deal is super dog-friendly too; almost every shop and pub has a jar of dog treats on the counter for its canine customers.

    British Railways (Southern Region), Deal and Walmer, Sunny and Bracing, by Frank Sherwin (1952), and South Eastern & Chatham Railway, ‘Invest in a Holiday at Deal’ by E. English © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

    Posters from the golden age of travel painted Deal as an ideal holiday destination. Deal still lives up to those expectations today, with its gently bustling high street and seafront, and miles of gorgeous sea view. On a clear day, you can even see France from the pier! Its beautiful coastline has been painted by famous artists including L.S. Lowry and J.M.W Turner. The town has also featured in movies and hit TV dramas, including Liar, Vanity Fair, and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.

    I’ve been to Deal three times now, and each trip has been a delight. If you’ve not been yet, here’s a little guide to things to do and places to go for food and drink. Enjoy!

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  • Mr Kipling’s poem about Medway

    For, now De Ruyter’s topsails
       Off naked Chatham show,
    We dare not meet him with our fleet –
       And this the Dutchmen know!

    Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Dutch in the Medway’

    Happy World Poetry Day! What better time to do a spot of research into poems about Medway? I couldn’t think of any poems about Medway – or Kent for that matter – off the top of my head, but I was pleased to discover that its history has inspired many famous writers! Today, I’ve picked out a poem by Rudyard Kipling. This one sparked my interest because it’s about the Dutch raid on the River Medway in June 1667, which I’ve written about before.

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  • Great places to eat on Watling Street

    An image of a pavement street sign that says 'Watling Street Sovereign Boulevard.'

    “Never eat more than you can lift.”

    Miss Piggy

    I am standing on a traffic island in the middle of Watling Street. I think I have achieved something almost impossible – being in two places at once. On this bit of Watling Street, one side is in Chatham, and the other is in Gillingham. So if my calculations are correct, my left foot is in Gillingham, and my right foot is in Chatham: two places at once. That’s just one of many interesting things about this apparently average road.

    Watling Street is a really long street – 276 miles long to be exact, stretching all the way from Dover to Anglesey in North Wales. It passes through many towns and cities, and has connections to Charles Dickens, James Bond and Star Wars. As John Higgs writes in his informative book, ‘Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past’, Watling Street is a road that is “simultaneously mundane and extraordinary.”

    A photo of the book, 'Watling Street - Travels through Britain and It's Ever-Present Past' by John Higgs. The cover is red and illustrated with an image containing pictures of Shakespeare, Robin Hood, traffic cones, a Welsh red dragon and a pigeon. There is a cup of tea in the background of the photo.
    ‘Watling Street – Travels through Britain and It’s Ever-Present Past’ by John Higgs

    Watling Street is also really old. According to some historians, it even pre-dates the Romans. The name Watling Street originated in the Dark Ages and comes from the word ‘Waecla’. Waecla was a local warlord whose people were known as the Waeclingas. According to John Higgs, the Waeclingas didn’t actually build the road we now know as Watling Street. It was just named after the Waeclingas because it ran through their territory. The original name of the road was “Waeclinga Straet”, which later became ‘Watling Street’. That’s the name you will still see used along many parts of the modern day road, including in Kent.

    Watling Street runs right through Medway, and the bit I know best is in Gillingham. Disappointingly, the Medway part of Watling Street gets scant coverage in John Higgs’ book, and Gillingham doesn’t even get a mention. But I think it’s worth talking about, so here we go.

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  • A Most Wonderfully Suitable Book: ‘A Portrait of the River Medway’ by Roger Penn

    “I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books—whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking… Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.”

    Cecelia Ahern

    It’s amazing, the chance encounters you can have in bookshops.

    In December, I was in Barter Books in Alnwick.

    Alnwick is a town in Northumberland, probably most famous nowadays for being the home of the castle that’s used as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies – Alnwick Castle.

    A view of the exterior of Alnwick Castle on a cloudy day. The castle stands on a low grassy hill. The hill is dotted with trees and there is a river at the bottom.
    Alnwick Castle/Hogwarts, December 2023

    Barter Books is one of the best bookshops in the whole world.

    That’s not an exaggeration. Go there for yourself and you’ll see what I mean.

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  • In the metropolis

    Illustration and extract from 'The Red-Headed League' by Arthur Conan Doyle on the platform wall at Baker Street Tube station.

    “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.”

    Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Red-Headed League‘

    Unlike the world’s most famous consulting detective, my knowledge of London is far from exact. There are parts of London I know very well, and other parts I don’t know at all. Some of my knowledge is bang up-to-date; the rest is historic and reliant on memories of places that have moved on and changed without me. Because that’s the thing about London – it just will not stay still.

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  • Santa’s Medway helper

    “Good haul this year,” he informed Harry through a cloud of paper. “Thanks for the Broom Compass, it’s excellent, beats Hermione’s — she’s got me a homework planner.”

    Ron Weasley, ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’

    Last week, the Man of Kent and I were driving back from the shops, and I saw a house that had a Christmas tree up in the front room. It was 11 November. This week, my inbox is full of gift guides from various (book)shops and websites I like, some people I know have cracked open the boxes of mince pies, and I’ve already watched Bridget Jones’s Diary. Like it or not, the festive season is upon us. I had been thinking about a Christmas shopping post for a while, but seeing that tree last week was my signal to get a shuffle on. So, here we go.

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  • Mysterious and spooky

    “Everyone knows someone who has seen the ghost of Blue Bell Hill.”

    A conversation overheard in a local bookshop, once upon a time:

    Customer: Do you have any books about local ghosts?

    Bookseller: I think we’ve got one or two. Were you looking for something in particular?

    Customer: Do you have anything about the ghost of Blue Bell Hill?

    Bookseller: (makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a cough) Sorry. It’s just that it’s one of those things, you know – everyone knows someone who has seen the ghost of Blue Bell Hill.

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  • Walking the Lines

    The Great Lines Heritage Park, with the Pentagon Centre and Chatham Naval Memorial in the background.

    ‘To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum.’

    Jane Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice’

    It took a national lockdown for me to fully appreciate the Great Lines.

    March 2020. Covid-19. Lockdown. Everyone ordered to stay at home, stay two metres apart, and only go outside for one hour a day. Well, those of us who weren’t frontline workers risking their lives for the rest of us, anyway.

    I’d been commuting into an office in London five days a week for my whole working life until then. Gillingham to London Cannon Street, London Victoria, occasionally London Blackfriars – and back again – Monday to Friday for about 15 years. More on commuting another time. For now, suffice it to say that leaving the house by 7:00am and getting home around 7:00pm on weekdays doesn’t leave much time for exploring the neighbourhood after work.

    That all changed in March 2020. Suddenly my office wasn’t an open plan space with a view over central London; it was the dining room in our tiny house. My brisk walk to and from Gillingham station, and London-speed march to the office and back again at the other end, was no longer available. Going out in the evening was totally kiboshed. I wasn’t furloughed, nor was the Man of Kent, so we worked from home, at alternate ends of the dining room table. That’s a heck of a lot of time in one small house, on top of plenty of sedentary telly-watching after work. Getting out for some exercise and fresh air was no longer baked into the day as part of my commute, or an optional weekend leisure activity. It was now imperative. A sanity-saving daily mission.

    So I, and often the Man of Kent too, started going out for late afternoon walks in a big, open space not far from here – the Great Lines Heritage Park.

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  • Books, She Bought: Five favourite bookshops in Medway and Kent

    An image of the exterior of Baggins Book Bazaar, Rochester.

    “A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”

    Terry Pratchett, ‘Guards! Guards!’

    In a small, terraced house in Medway, there is a spare bedroom full of books. There’s also a bed and a chest of drawers in the room, a cupboard, and an old Victorian fireplace. But the books take up most of the space and they’re everywhere. Not in a gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling-shelves, fairy-tale-library kind of way, but in a boxes-upon-boxes-of-books-amassed-over-many-years way. There are books in cardboard boxes under the bed, in the drawers in the chest, on top of the cupboard and in plastic crates on the floor. If you stood in the limited amount of empty floorspace in the middle of this room and looked around, you’d think that whoever lives here is either a wannabe librarian, or someone with a serious book-hoarding problem.

    Well, one of the people living in the house is me, and it’s my lifelong love of reading that has led to the creation of this booky black hole.

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  • From NE10 to ME7

    “You’ll like Gillingham. It’s a lot like Gateshead.”

    The year was 2005-ish. I had just finished university, where I met my now-husband. I’d left my hometown of Gateshead to move in with him, and we were discussing where we were going to live.  

    My husband is a man of Kent. Specifically, a man born and raised in the Medway towns. I knew very little about Medway before I met him. In fact, it’s fair to say that I didn’t know much about the South East past London before then. I knew Kent was known as ‘the garden of England’, home of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett and green fields dotted with oasthouses. But Medway? I’d never heard of it.

    He was trying to sell me Gillingham as being like a home from home, I think possibly on the basis that Gillingham and Gateshead both have lots of Victorian terraced houses. I wasn’t fooled though; I knew the real reason he wanted to move to Gillingham was to be within walking distance of a certain Priestfield Stadium, home of his beloved football team. But, for solid pragmatic reasons (we both had jobs in London that we needed to commute to by train) and more importantly because I love him, I agreed to move down South. It was a leap of faith, and a geographic leap of about 303 miles from postcode NE10 to ME7.

    So we moved in together in the mid-noughties, a young (then) lass from Gateshead and a man of Kent. We lived then, and continue to live now, in a tiny, ramshackle house in Gillingham.

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