The Brook, Chatham
The Brook, historically the Old Bourne River, is a significant street and area in Chatham, Kent. Originating as a natural stream, it played a crucial role in the town's early development. It was known for 19th-century slums and public health issues. Today, it serves as a main road with civic and commercial functions.
History
The Brook is a route that follows the course of a formerly open stream. In its earliest days the Brook valley was a shallow watercourse feeding into the River Medway at Holborn Wharf, adjacent to Sun Pier.Romano-British cremation urn burials
In 1907–1910, eleven Romano-British cremation urn burials were uncovered on The Brook during construction of a mission church. Excavations for the church's foundations encountered multiple inhumation pits and urn burials. Eleven pottery urns containing cremated remains were recovered, with finds recorded in 1910. A Kent County Council report summarizes: "Eleven Romano-British urns were found in 1910, with pseudo Samian, Durobrivian and other wares". In Roman Britain, such urn burials typically represent the cremated remains of individuals interred in vessels; the number of urns suggests a small cemetery or ritual deposit.After their discovery, the urns were briefly housed in the Chatham Technical Institute, a local museum and school. However, the assemblage has since been lost: the Sites and monuments record notes that the finds "are no longer in Chatham Technical Institute; they were dispersed some time ago", and their present whereabouts are unknown. Thus, detailed analysis of the pottery and human remains is limited to the 1911 report by G. Payne and later summaries. Despite their dispersal, the urn burials at The Brook remain important evidence of Roman-period activity and funerary practice in the Chatham area, complementing other nearby Romano-British cemeteries and settlements.
19th century on
By the early 19th century the stream had become heavily polluted and surrounded by dense low-class housing, so that it was associated with poverty and disease. Dr Thomas Stratton was "worried that the marines had caught cholera because they lived near the Brook." and he warned of the public health hazard posed by the foul stream. Over time the Brook was culverted and built over, and a formal sewerage and pumping scheme was installed in the 1920s, which opened in 1929, to carry away the polluted water.By the late 19th century, the open Brook had essentially been covered and the valley built up. In 1911, Rochester and Chatham jointly undertook a main drainage scheme, culminating in the opening of the Brook Pumping Station in September 1929. This brick pumping station was designed to lift foul sewage from the low-lying Brook area into the new sewer outfall, completing the town's modern sewage system. During this period the old Brook valley was leveled into a roadway and the surrounding slums were gradually cleared. By 1930 many of the dilapidated houses on and around The Brook had been demolished for health reasons. In the 1970s, the area underwent further redevelopment: the Pentagon Shopping Centre was built over former housing and alleys on the site, fundamentally reshaping the street grid around The Brook.
Sewerage history
Chatham's first settlement, known as Ceteham, lay on low-lying marsh by the Medway estuary, bounded by an earth embankment known as the Land Wall. Built in the 16th century, this causeway (roughly the line of modern Globe Lane served as a flood defense across the mouth of the Old Bourne River. An early tide mill stood on the Brook by the late medieval period. The Land Wall's embankment, together with a stone quay wall along the Medway, effectively turned the central part of Chatham into a "cupped hand" with poor natural drainage. By the 18th century the marshland south-east of the Land Wall had been drained and the Brook channelled into narrow open trenches and culverts that acted as primitive sewers. These covered drains, supplemented by countless cesspits, ran beneath the growing town. Earlier, the Navy Commissioners had been ordered to repair the wharf, installing two posts and a chain to reserve it exclusively for State use. The 1694 and 1697 Estimates even list "Keeper of the Key of Landwall, £1," and in 1712 locksmith Richard Burton billed 15 s. for repairing the Land Wall barrier lock and crafting a new key. The population in the Brook area increased rapidly: in 1801, Chatham had about 10,500 residents, rising to ~37,000 by 1901. Over the 18th–19th centuries the former marsh was densely built up with poor housing and narrow alleys. The young Charles Dickens lived briefly at 18 St Mary's Place, The Brook during 1821–1822. Throughout the 19th century, waste disposal remained primitive – streets and houses relied on cesspits and old culverts for sewage, and in dry weather sanitation was notoriously bad. Even early 19th-century records, the court leet archives, noted increasing public-health concerns and pollutants killing off oyster beds and fish in the River Medway.For context, as of 2021 Chatham's estimated population is around 76,983.
Public health crises and local reform (19th century)
Chatham suffered disease outbreaks that underscored its sanitation failures. Sporadic cases of cholera appeared by the 1830s; notably, in spring 1832 a sailor in Chatham died of cholera. Chatham Dockyard endured cholera too: an 1832 dockyard epidemic prompted the Admiralty to order that any cholera-stricken worker be sent to hospital and paid during isolation. Cholera was so rampant that the Brook area was declared off‑limits to the troops. Further cholera epidemics and other contagious diseases struck Kent's Medway towns, intensifying pressure for sanitary reform. In 1852, a board of health survey documented Chatham's diseases and "stinking drains, recommending modern sewers."Under the Public Health Act 1848, Chatham adopted a formal Local board of health in 1849. This new board took over the medieval Court Leet's civic duties. Through the 1850s–1880s the Local Board oversaw modest sewerage improvements. Reports and vestry minutes from this era mention hiring scavengers to remove refuse, cleansing gutters, and draining swamps in an ad hoc fashion, though much waste still lay in open drains. The Brooklyn-style culverts in The Brook were occasionally cleared or relined, but no comprehensive system existed.
Victorian expansion and drainage schemes
By the late 19th century, it became clear that Chatham needed a unified solution. After surveying options, Chatham's council established a drainage committee in 1911, under the mayor, Alderman E.A. Billingshurst, and engineer W.H. Radford. This committee developed plans for a Rochester & Chatham Joint Main Drainage Scheme. In 1920 a formal Joint Sewerage District was constituted by government order for Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham, and the Rochester and Chatham Joint Sewerage Board was created.Construction followed in the 1920s. The £650,000 scheme laid a large intercepting sewer from Chatham, under New Road and Gillingham, out to a treatment works at Motney Hill on the Rainham Marshes. The works included a pumping station on Solomons Road in Chatham's Brook area to lift sewage from the low-lying town into the main outfall. The Brook Low Level Pumping Station opened on 25 September 1929, finalising the joint drainage scheme.
Engineering of the main drainage works
The pumping station was designed to deal with Chatham's chronic flooding and sewage. Its underground sewage tank has foundations about deep, a major engineering challenge. The station's machinery, now preserved, consisted of multiple pumps: two and two Blackstone centrifugal pumps, driven by electric motors, for normal and storm flows, plus two large pumps driven by Campbell diesel engines. In normal weather the smaller pumps handled up to per hour of sewage. In storm surges, the larger pumps boosted capacity to about /hour, discharging excess via a dedicated storm tower into the Medway.During flood conditions, the station could even pump diluted effluent directly over the quayside into the river, minimizing street flooding. By 1979, a modern electric pumping station replaced the old plant, and the Old Brook building survives as a scheduled monument and working museum.
Social history
19th-century slum conditions
By the early 19th century, Chatham had become a busy military and naval depot, spurring rapid population growth. The Brook ran through one of the town's poorest neighborhoods, and over time, housing in the low-lying Brook valley deteriorated into a notorious slum district. Contemporary accounts note that this "once desirable area" of Chatham went into steep decline: by the 1800s it was synonymous with poverty, overcrowding and squalor. Hundreds of workers and their families crowded into tiny alleys and courts off The Brook – places with names like Cage Lane, Queen Street, Sly Kates catered especially to officers and civilians from the nearby dockyard. The Mitre Hotel on High Street, demolished in 1934, was similarly renowned as a tavern for soldiers and sailors. In this environment police often faced crowds and riots: one study recounts that in the 1870s–80s Chatham was racked by "wild behaviour… descending into riot" on a regular basis, involving not only drunken soldiers and sailors but also local youths. It was said that merely arresting a rowdy brawler "set off a chain reaction" of stone-throwing mobs aiming to free their comrades. In short, by the mid-19th century Chatham's Brook quarter had a "bowerbird of vice" reputation – the type of Dickensian slum quarter evoked in contemporary literature.The Brook in Victorian Chatham: red-light district and vice
The Brook – a narrow street linking Chatham's dockyard to the High Street – gained a notorious reputation in the 19th century as a rough, disreputable quarter. By the late 1800s, contemporary observers noted that the once-desirable residential area around The Brook had become "identified with dreadful living conditions, not to say immoral and criminal activity". A 19th-century memoirist recalled that "the road that led from the dockyard gate to London went through an area of Chatham known as The Brook, notorious for many dens and brothels where sailors… could expect to be robbed". Police and reformers lamented that low-paid dockyard workers and transient soldiers were preyed upon here by unscrupulous madams. Dickens, who grew up at St Mary's Place in The Brook, later depicted Chatham as a rowdy military town, for example, The Pickwick Papers notes crowds gathering in "the utmost bustle and excitement" for a military review, reflecting the town's gritty character.The Brook was lined with dozens of ordinary pubs, beer-houses and lodging-houses – many associated in the public mind with prostitution. For example, an 1864 directory lists the White Lion at the eastern end of The Brook and the White Swan just above Cage Lane, among other taverns along the street. Further west toward the High Street stood the Lord Nelson opposite Willmott Street and the Three Cups on the corner of Queen Street. '' These establishments catered to the dockyard and garrison clientele. The local press of the era regularly reported fights and rowdy behavior in and around the Brook's pubs, often linking them with prostitution. Letters to Kent newspapers complained of general disorderliness and the high number of prostitutes at The Brook's drinking-houses. In short, The Brook and adjacent High Street were seen as the town's red-light district, a place of cheap beer, gambling, and illicit rendezvous.
To police and clergy The Brook seemed a hotbed of vice. During the period when the Contagious Diseases Acts applied to Chatham, plain-clothes Metropolitan police were dispatched into the military towns specifically to curb venereal disease. Chatham was designated a "subjected area" under these acts, meaning suspected prostitutes could be forcibly examined and, if found infected, confined for treatment. In practice, officers would sweep through areas like The Brook, arresting women on suspicion and requiring them to report for invasive medical inspections.
One contemporary account explains: "Policemen… arrest suspected prostitutes… subjected to what was often a forcible examination. If… venereal disease was present, the woman… taken to a lock hospital – so called because the patients were locked up – where she would be detained until cured, a process that could take months." Chatham even built its own purpose-built lock hospital in 1869 to house and treat women detained under the Acts. These measures, however, were controversial: local reformers and national activists criticized the Acts as unjustly targeting women and tacitly condoning prostitution. Once the Acts were suspended in 1883, police observations suggest that street prostitution around The Brook resurged, underscoring how pervasive the trade had been. An excerpt notes: "Statistical evidence relating to the ages of Kentish prostitutes is scarce and contradictory and has to be used with care. Of the 590 women admitted to the Chatham lock hospital during the six months to March 1871, for example, only 35 were under 20 years old."
Chatham's 19th-century councils and philanthropists also moved to reshape the Brook's image through urban renewal. After Chatham became a municipal borough in 1890, many of the oldest houses and pubs around The Brook were demolished as substandard or crime-ridden. Leading citizens had long complained that the narrow courts and alleys off the Brook were slums where disease spread easily. Reports from the 1870s describe The Brook as "badly drained and ventilated" and littered with mud, contributing to cholera and fever outbreaks. Civic reformers saw connection between this squalor and the area's immoral reputation, and they targeted it for clearance. As a result, within a few years of incorporation the site of The Brook was partly re-planned: the old dens and brothels gave way to wider streets, municipal buildings, and modern housing.