Sheppey – isle that time forgot
From the great road bridge that arcs high over the Swale, the Isle of Sheppey looks like a wrinkled tablecloth of flat fields and salt marshes. Flocks of sheep and cattle graze beneath wind turbines and cable-knit electricity pylons.
Elsewhere in North Kent, Londoners migrate to Margate, Faversham and Whitstable in search of the British seaside town – but with artisan gin.
Sheppey has yet to catch up – and with luck, it won’t. Those who visit the isle are a different kind of tourist, looking for something unusual.
David Harrison is an artist based in London and Sheppey where he has lived for 12 years in one of the hundreds of makeshift chalets in Leysdown. Sheppey is ‘the most magical place on earth’, he says. Here, an hour from London, you see harriers, one of the rarest birds in Britain, floating around the marshes. Short-eared owls, lapwings and merlins breed on the island’s National Nature Reserves. Golden samphire and sea poppies grow on its pristine beaches.
The people who flock here are equally interesting.
‘I remember one day,’ David told me, ‘meeting a man on the marshes who had spent 11 years writing a book on owls. And then along the path I saw a fat builder type and his wife who was in a deckchair reading a women’s rag. He took off all his clothes and was wearing suspenders and little knickers and a bra and the concrete boots and his wife was like, “Yeah, seen it all before,” and I thought, “I just love this place.” ’
Leysdown is a coastal village on the east side of the island, with dodgems, doughnuts and karaoke nights in sawdust pubs and the Coffee Pot café, where David goes for proper egg and chips and ‘to chat to the lovely ladies’.
‘Some people catch the Sheppey bug,’ says Will Palin, conservation director at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. He and a few other mavericks came to Sheerness, on the west side of the island, in 2009, in search of Georgian naval architecture.
The buildings on the fringes of the town – including a £50m Aldi warehouse – suggest such a search would be futile. But travel further in, and you’ll discover a terrace of large, muscular Georgian houses
where Nelson stayed, a military hospital for maritime casualties, a Grade I listed boat store (the world’s first multi-frame steel building) and the Grade II* Dockyard Church.
The 60-acre dockyard, engineered for the navy by John Rennie, was completed by 1830. The navy continued to occupy Sheerness until 1961, when the port was sold to a commercial company; the local economy plummeted and the town is now one of the poorest in the UK.
Ten years ago, Palin’s group of investors bought, for £1.85 million, seven houses and the church, which was decimated by a fire in 2001.
‘I didn’t really know what I was doing,’ he recalls; ‘satisfying a whim, perhaps.’
The whim has become the Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust, whose aim is to make the town’s architectural heritage a catalyst for its regeneration. The trust has raised £4.2 million to restore the church.
On a warm, overcast day in July, when the cottonwood trees were shedding their summer snow, I looked round the church with architectural historian and trustee of the charity Andrew Byrne, who was one of the first investors to buy with Will in Sheerness. ‘It’s hard to find the kind of house I like – Georgian, with a big garden,’ he said. His house is behind the dockyard wall and has a 200-foot garden, where he grows grapes.
The church is still mostly intact, though the beams are charred and precarious under the weight of plump pigeons. Great cast-iron Doric columns, pioneered by the navy in 1820, hold up the façade.
The architects who restored the Painted Hall in Greenwich plan to make the church a place where the community comes together – with a café and offices for local charity Kent Youth Support Trust (KYST), which helps young people to start up their own businesses.
‘This project will really change the town,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s about three things: KYST, community and the model.’
The 1820s model is a 1,600-squarefoot wooden replica of the dockyard, meticulously preserved. One of the world’s largest architectural models, it will be exhibited in the church when the work is finished – it is hoped by the summer of 2021. ‘The model will draw people from all over the country,’ Andrew said. John Rennie’s Dockyard Church (1830), Sheerness, gutted in 1881 and 2001
Leaving Andrew, I walked to the seafront, where ‘Welcome to Sheerness: you’ll have a blast’ is graffitied across a granite wall. Painted below, the transgender Montgomery Mermaid languishes scowling, about to detonate a box of dynamite. The words refer to the SS Richard Montgomery, a US ship wrecked a mile off the coast in 1944 with a hold full of undetonated explosives.
I walked up onto the seafront and spotted the masts of the ship peeping above the swell. The beach was clean and the tide low, and a group of school children tore around the sand, clutching crabs. A man with a large tattoo on his neck and his girlfriend in high heels tottered onto the sand. They paused for a long and romantic kiss before tucking in to a Mcdonald’s picnic.
I wound down the roof of my old car and drove on, stopping at Minster Abbey on the highest point of the island. The abbey is one of the oldest operational churches in England, a place of worship for more than 1,400 years. Trampled confetti decorated the path to the church and the smell of cheap Chinese wafted up from the restaurant below.
That night, I stayed in the Ferry House Inn, a 16th-century pub on the easternmost point of the island. The Ferry is part of the Burden brothers’ business empire on Sheppey; a combination of farmland, meat production and hospitality. On a Tuesday night, the restaurant was busy, mostly with romantic couples. Eighty per cent of the Ferry’s food comes from the brothers’ land and the extensive kitchen garden, and dishes are delicate, fresh and fancy. I had a zesty kale salad with marinated game on a skewer, and smoked partridge arranged on a square plate. Here there is even (whisper it softly) artisan gin.
The bedrooms are reached through the kitchen and up a narrow staircase. Above the bed, an instruction to DREAM and the lyrics of Ellie Goulding’s How Long Will I Love You are written on the wall. The bed is big and very comfortable, the bath hot and the view over the Swale splendid.
I stood outside and watched the light retreat, as the last, luminescent rays peeped through the clouds in neat, diagonal lines. A harrier erupted from the marshes, followed by an egret, pure white against the great, grey sky.
The Ferry House Inn has doubles from £60 a night. Sheppey is served by the Sheerness railway line