Sittingbourne Water

The plan is to write a history of this place. A complete history, nothing left out. The big stories of Roman roads and pilgrimage and the small stories of local people, the spirit (or spirits, plural?) of the place, the Swale, the steam railway. To find, pin down, and write about the soul of Sittingbourne, that’s the plan. As Sittingbourne Steam Railway’s first Writer-in-Residence.

I’m stood on the side of a muddy creek on a hot day and it’s all smell. Nothing else smells like this – low tide, saltwater mud baking in the sun. Wet and dry, all at once. Not unpleasant, but probably an acquired taste.

Smell and sound – the crackle and pop of mud shrimp, the cry of wading birds, the lazy gurgle of water draining away. I’m surprised to have found this old, old landscape here: nothing on the journey suggested it would end in this wide wild space, untamed, untameable. This could be today or yesterday or a hundred years ago or a thousand: I knew we’d find steam trains here, but a Roman auxiliary or a Medieval pilgrim could walk round the corner and that would feel perfectly reasonable, too.

The heavy smell and the sound I remember from childhood trips with the Young Ornithologist’s Club to Pagham, and from hanging about on the bohemian houseboats at Shoreham-by-Sea in my 20s. But behind me is Kent, not Sussex. A railway yard full of the oddest little engines, and beyond that a paper mill.

We rode out here from the Sittingbourne end of the railway. The Sittingbourne Viaduct Station is simple: a platform, on top of an embankment, with a ticket office in a shipping container, and a few old wagons in a siding. The line curves away from the station, riding over the industrial edges of the town on a concrete viaduct, and the town falls behind. Things get wilder, shaggier, more overgrown.

And then the chimneys, off to the left, and the tall buildings, and you get to Kemsley, skirting the edge of the paper mill.

Paper mill. That sounds simple, somehow, a descriptor of a building that fits an archetype. Brick, maybe – Victorian industrial – four storeys high. You can imagine that. This isn’t that. It’s a vast industrial complex, peak end-stage capitalism, an area the size of a small town (and this is only half of what was once here), planned at the scale of lorries 16 to 18 metres long that can deliver forty-and-some tonnes of old paper and card for pulping or take away the same in finished cardboard for distribution. When this site was run by Bowaters, it was rolls of their newsprint that nearly killed James Bond, in Moonraker. Ian Fleming loved Kent – the golf courses, St Margaret’s Bay, the winding roads and the roadside inns – so knew the sight of those lorries.

And today’s papermill is somewhere Daniel Craig’s Bond would understand. Fingerprint access, anonymous cabins with dark windows where security monitor the whole landscape. Wide concrete roads that sweep between buildings, high concrete-block walls like sangars, big empty spaces. You can hear the squeal of Austin Martin tyres, if you listen hard enough, imagine the choreography of a filmed chase here. Except it’s empty. Not a person in sight. Nobody here. Things are moving, shifting, working. Somebody is watching the whole time.

The Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railway is a well-preserved fragment of the narrow gauge network that once served this paper mill and the one back in the town centre. It opened in 1904 with a horse-drawn tramway at the Sittingbourne end to carry materials between the wharf and the mill. And in 1905, the company – Lloyds, publisher of the London Illustrated News – purchased three steam locomotives. And in 1924, with expansion impossible at the old Sittingbourne Paper Mills, owner Edward Lloyd built the new mill at Kemsley and used three kilometres of railway to connect them. He threw that concrete viaduct across the terraced houses at the edge of town and straddled a creek, and threaded pipes along the same route, to carry steam, water, and paper pulp between the two sites. External umbilical cords, visibly holding the two places together.

The creek, though – it reminds me of the wild marsh that Paul Gallico or Charles Dickens would write about – is still the key. A narrow path, the Saxon Shore Way, wide enough for a single person, almost overgrown and possibly forgotten. I don’t see any walkers, and it’s a long way to come for mud. An old concrete wharf, and a circle of bolts where there was once a crane to unload the Thames barges that serviced the mills before articulated lorries took over.

It’s all about water, this place – even when, like today, the tide is out. Water as transport, water as raw material, water as waste disposal. The watery landscape has defined this place – how it looks, how we live here, how we use the place – for a thousand and more years. The Romans were up these creeks, close to Watling Street. The Danes built defences here in 893. Dutchman’s Island, Cockleshell Creek, and – just across the peninsula the paper mills sit on – Bedlams Bottom and Slaughterhouse Point. A landscape with capital-h History. Place names to write stories about.

A place to work, a place to live. Kemsley’s original Model Village was an arcadia for paper mill workers, designed by Maxwell Fry before he went modernist.

About the same time as he was designing stations for the Southern Railway at Margate and Ramsgate, before he brought Walter Gropius into exile, into safety. But Kemsley’s now a suburb of Sittingbourne. Suburban-sounding,
Sittingbourne, it could be a suburb of London – although the landscape is hidden in the name, wrapped up in the word for anyone who studies language to see. A ‘bourne’ or ‘burn’ in a place name means a stream or brook – as in
Bournemouth or Kilburn, Holborn or Eastbourne. In the 1790s, in his History of Kent, Hasted says that:
Sittingbourne was anciently written Sedingbourne, in Saxon, Saedingburga, i.e. the hamlet by the bourne or small stream. But today Sittingbourne hides its watery connection under dreams of suburbia, endless unlinked unknowable places. Little housing developments that don’t quite join up, ten or twenty house before the next thing comes at you – a 1930s council estate, some vague idea of something riverside, marina-ish in bright colours from the 1990s, 21st century fake-factory boxes in the middle of a real industrial estate, up against a working breaker’s yard. Nothing to give you a sense of place. Nothing you’d remember. Or at least, nothing you’d really make an effort to remember.

Where there is open water, it’s behind scrapyards, industrial units, across the wasteland Tesco bought but never built on. The water is still there, not just at Kemsley on the edges but right in the middle of the town – culverted and covered over, ignored, literally overlooked. One stream runs down Ufton Lane, and then northwards under the railway towards the site of the old paper mill – the Sittingbourne one, now demolished because it couldn’t match the potential of the scale of the Kemsley site. But the main waterway is the bourne the town is named for, which, local historian Michael Peters says, flows down Bell Road and Crown Quay Lane into the town creek at the back of the industrial estate. It’s all there, energy and potential, still moving as water will, a strange psychic force under the townscape. Possibility, change.

One day, everyone in Sittingbourne will wake up to the water, turn their town around to face it, make the creek and the old wharf by the Sittingbourne Viaduct Station the new town centre, and discover the utter and haunting beauty of the place where they live.

Read about Dan!