Rich and Strange 5

Rich and Strange is an occasional newsletter for paid subscribers. It looks at seaside towns and the rich culture that grows in them.

And while an edition is long overdue (I am sorry!) it’s not that I’ve been avoiding writing. I’m currently Writer-in-Residence for Sittingbourne’s Steam Railway, an Ideas Test commission. It’s not strictly seaside, but I’ve been writing about the landscape of the Swale and the Thames:

‘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.’

You can read the full piece, Sittingbourne Water, on the Ideas Test website.