Sheerness
Sheerness is a port town and civil parish beside the mouth of the River Medway on the north-west corner of the Isle of Sheppey in north Kent, England. With a population of 13,249, it is the second largest town on the island after the nearby town of Minster which has a population of 16,738.
Sheerness began as a fort built in the 16th century to protect the River Medway from naval invasion. In 1665 plans were first laid by the Navy Board for Sheerness Dockyard, a facility where warships might be provisioned and repaired. The site was favoured by Samuel Pepys, then Clerk of the Acts of the navy, for shipbuilding over Chatham inland. After the raid on the Medway in 1667, the older fortification was strengthened; in 1669 a Royal Navy dockyard was established in the town, where warships were stocked and repaired until its closure in 1960.
Beginning with the construction of a pier and a promenade in the 19th century, Sheerness acquired the added attractions of a seaside resort. Industry retains its important place in the town and the Port of Sheerness is one of the United Kingdom's leading car and fresh produce importers. The town is the site of one of the UK's first co-operative societies and also of the world's first multi-storey buildings with a rigid metal frame.
History
The first structure in what is now Sheerness was a fort built by order of Henry VIII to prevent enemy ships from entering the River Medway and attacking the naval dockyard at Chatham. In 1666 work began to replace it with a stronger fort. However, before its completion, this second fort was destroyed in 1667 by the Dutch Naval Fleet in their capture of the town, as part of what would be known as the raid on the Medway.The Secretary to the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys, subsequently ordered the construction of Sheerness Dockyard as an extension to that at Chatham. There was no established settlement in the vicinity of Sheerness, so most of the workers were initially housed in hulks. By 1738, dockyard construction workers had built the first houses in Sheerness, using materials they were allowed to take from the yard. The grey-blue naval paint they used on the exteriors led to their homes becoming known as the Blue Houses. This was eventually corrupted to Blue Town. The modern town of Sheerness has its origins in Mile Town, which was established later in the 18th century at a mile's distance from the dockyard.
In 1797, discontented sailors in the Royal Navy mutinied just off the coast of Sheerness.
By 1801 the population of the Minster-in-Sheppey parish, which included both Sheerness and the neighbouring town of Minster, reached 5,561. In 1816, one of the UK's first co-operative societies was started in Sheerness, chiefly to serve the dockyard workers and their families. The Sheerness Economical Society began as a co-operative bakery but expanded to produce and sell a range of goods. By the middle of the 20th century, the society had spread across the Isle of Sheppey and had been renamed the Sheerness and District Cooperative Society.
File:Joseph Mallord William Turner - Sheerness as seen from the Nore - 2005.31 - Museum of Fine Arts.jpg|thumb|Sheerness as Seen from the Nore by J.M.W. Turner, 1808
In the early 1820s a fire destroyed the old Blue Houses. New houses and a major redevelopment of the dockyard followed. A high brick wall and a moat were constructed around the yard to serve as a defence measure and remained in place until the end of the 19th century. As the settlement expanded eastwards, away from the dockyard and the Blue Houses, the wider area became known as Sheerness, taking its new name from the brightness or clearness of the water at the mouth of the River Medway. The rebuilt Dockyard contained many groundbreaking new buildings and structures; for example, completed in 1860 and still standing today, the Sheerness Boat Store was the world's first multi-storey building with a rigid metal frame.
In 1904 the RN established a torpedo school in Sheerness, with HMS Actaeon used as training hulk. The school closed in 1922.
From the completion of the dockyard until 1960 Sheerness was one of the bases of the Nore Command of the Royal Navy, which was responsible for protecting British waters in the North Sea. The command was named after the Nore sandbank in the Thames Estuary, about east of Sheerness.
In 1863, mains water was installed in the town, and the Isle of Sheppey's first railway station opened at the dockyard. Towards the end of the 19th century, Sheerness achieved official town status and formed its own civil parish, separate from Minster-in-Sheppey. The 1901 Census recorded the Sheerness parish as having 18,179 residents and 2,999 houses.
The town's low rainfall and ample sunshine made it popular as a seaside resort, with tourists arriving by steamboat and train. The Sheppey Light Railway opened in 1901, connecting the new Sheerness East station with the rest of the island. However, by 1950, lack of demand led to the railway's closure. The Sheerness and District Tramways, which opened in 1903, only lasted until 1917.
In 1944 the United States cargo ship ran aground and sank off the coast of Sheerness, with large quantities of explosives on board. Due to the inherent danger and projected expense, the ship and its cargo have never been salvaged; if the wreck were to explode, it would be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions of all time. A 2004 report published in New Scientist warned that an explosion could occur if sea water penetrated the bombs.
During the Second World War the Shoeburyness Boom, which ran across the Thames Estuary to protect shipping from submarine attack, ran from Sheerness to Shoeburyness in Essex. A similar structure was built along the same alignment in the early 1950s to protect against Soviet submarines. The Sheerness end of the boom was demolished in the 1960s.
In March 1960 the Royal Navy ceased operating the Sheerness dockyard and the Medway Port Authority took over the site for commercial use. The dockyard closure led to thousands of job losses, and most of the nearby houses and shops in the Bluetown area were eventually abandoned and demolished. By the 1961 census, the population of Sheerness had fallen to 13,691. The dockyard closure also led to the decline of the Sheerness and District Cooperative Society, as many of its members were dockyard workers. At the time, the society was the island's main retailer, but it has since been reduced to a few shops and been merged with a larger society.
The German writer Uwe Johnson lived in Sheerness for the last decade of his life, from 1974 to 1984, having left East Germany. A monograph by Patrick Wright, The Sea View Has Me Again, was published by Repeater Books in 2020.
In 2003, the Beachfields Park project was organised to publicise Beachfields' heritage and to preserve it for future generations. Students of Cheyne Middle School and Minster College, with assistance from local organisations, researched the funfair, bandstands, Prisoner of the War hut, boating lake and bowling green. As part of the project, students wrote a book, Tales of Beachfields Park, which won the Historical Association Young Historian Primary School Award for Local History.
As of 2007, Bluetown is an industrial area, and Sheerness has become the largest port in the UK for motor imports. Prior to the closure of the Dockyard, twenty-five of its historic buildings were listed in recognition of their "architectural distinction and value"; regardless of this, the majority were subsequently demolished and others were left to decay. In the early 21st century a concerted effort was made to save the remaining buildings and several have been restored to residential use. In July 2013 Swale Borough Council announced that a deal had been reached to secure restoration of Rennie and Taylor's Royal Dockyard Church, with a view to new uses such as displaying the above-mentioned model of the Dockyard.
Mills
Sheerness has had four windmills. They were the Little Mill, a smock mill that was standing before 1813 and burnt down on 7 February 1862; The Hundred Acre Mill, a small tower mill which was last worked in 1872 and demolished in 1878 leaving a base which remains today; The Great Mill, a smock mill, the building of which was started in 1813 and completed in 1816, which was demolished in 1924 leaving the base, upon which a replica mill body was built to serve as flats.On 23 January 2008 a fire started in the mill tower. The fire was declared not to have been a case of arson; Little is known of the fourth windmill, said to have been a vertical axle windmill designed by Stephen Hooper.
Governance
Sheerness is in the parliamentary constituency of Sittingbourne and Sheppey. Since the constituency's creation in 1997 until 2010 the Member of Parliament was Derek Wyatt of the Labour Party. At the 2010 general election, Gordon Henderson of the Conservative Party won the seat. Before 1997, Sheppey and Sittingbourne were part of the constituency of Faversham. Sheerness is in the local government district of Swale. The town is covered by the local government wards of Sheerness, which has three of the forty-seven seats on the Swale Borough Council. At the 2015 local elections, two of those seats were held by the Labour Party and one by UKIP.Swale Borough Council is responsible for running local services, such as recreation, refuse collection and council housing; Kent County Council is responsible for education, social services and trading standards. Both councils are involved in town planning and road maintenance. From 1894 to 1968, Sheerness formed its own local government district, Sheerness Urban District, and lay within the administrative county of Kent. Over much of the past century, the Labour Party has received the most support in Sheerness, mainly due to the town's industrial nature. As early as 1919, the town had four Labour councillors; Faversham elected its first only in 1948.