“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.