is an English town that developed around an important naval dockyard on the east bank of the
River Medway in the county of
Kent . Together with
Rochester ,
Gillingham and
Strood it is today part of the
Medway Towns conurbation.
Chatham Dockyard was established by
Henry VIII and the small village of Chatham grew. At one point thousands of men were employed at the dockyard, and many hundreds of ships and
Submarine s were launched there including
HMS Victory which was built there in the
1760s . The dockyard was shut as an operational site 1984 by the Thatcher government; a large part of it became a historic site (operated by Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust) and the rest has been developed for housing, industrial sites and as a commercial marina.
Chatham is also the site of many of the fortifications built to protect the dockyard from invasion. The Great Lines (abbreviated from "great lines of defence") were built across the neck of the peninsula formed by the bend in the river. By 1758 this stretched for more than a mile from
Fort Amherst (today a heritage site) to Gillingham Reach. Later,
Forts were built above the town, among them
Fort Luton (also a heritage site),
Fort Pitt (later used as a hospital by Florence Nightingale; the site is now a girls' grammar school),
Fort Horsted and
Fort Clarence . Many still exist; some have been converted into housing; others have been demolished.
The town was also the location for several military barracks, most of which have now shut. Although the postal address of Brompton Barracks (the headquarters of the
Royal Engineers ) indicates Chatham as its location, Brompton was an entirely separate village within Gillingham parish.
Chatham became a market town in its own right in the 19th century, and a
Municipal Borough in 1890. By 1831 its population had reached more than 16,000. By 1961 it had reached 48,800.
More recently,
Chatham has been cited as the potential source for the somewhat derogatory term
Chav . There may be some truth in this owing to the term
Chav being a commonly used colloquialism around the area during the
1980s .
Chatham stood on
Watling Street , the Roman road from London to the Kent Coast; the length of it from Chatham to
Canterbury was
Turnpiked in 1730, to become the
A2 Main Road in the 1920s. In 2005 the
M2 Motorway diverts all through traffic south of the Medway Towns. The central bus station for the towns is in Chatham, within walking distance of the railway station.
The railway came to Chatham in 1858: first when the
East Kent Railway opened a line to
Faversham ; and later in the year when the short section to connect with the
North Kent Line to London was opened.
Chatham Railway Station is the main interchange for the Medway towns.
The
River Medway , apart from its use by warships to travel to and from the dockyard, was an important means of communication to the interior of Kent. Timber from the Weald for shipbuilding and agricultural produce were among the cargoes. Sun Pier in Chatham was one of many such along the river.
The town's
Association Football club,
Chatham Town F.C. , plays in the
Southern League Division One East .
Charles Dickens lived in the town as a small boy, both in the Brook and in Ordnance Terrace before the railway station was built just opposite. He subsequently described it as the happiest period of his childhood, and eventually returned to the area in adulthood when he bought a house in nearby
Gad's Hill .
Others of note include the composer
Percy Whitlock (1903-1946); the painter and killer
Richard Dadd (1819-1887); and, in more modern times, the artist
Billy Childish and the author and screenwriter
Stel Pavlou .
The town has recently become associated with
Chavs , a word taken from the
Romany word ''chav'' meaning 'boy', describing a set of cheap fashions and taste associated with white, working-class young people, and commonly thought to be an abbreviation of "Chatham Average".
Chatham sports a strong unsigned music scene, mainly thanks to the Post-Core Collective
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Urban Fox Press and
Rock 'N' Rant , and the movements they represent.
