Places
Water has shaped the story of the Medway valley for as long as people have lived beside it. Records of the river overflowing its banks stretch right back to the year 1600, when flooding at Yalding was serious enough that those affected felt compelled to send a petition seeking help. It was not simply a matter of wet gardens and ruined crops. Householders caught by the rising water, along with their livestock, had no choice but to take themselves and their animals upstairs, living on upper floors until the waters fell away again.
Such disasters were not rare one-offs. In the centuries that followed, a major flood struck the valley on average roughly once every twenty-five years, a rhythm that must have hung over every generation living on the floodplain.
The most terrible of these events came in 1853, when disaster struck at Hadlow. A wagon carrying hop-pickers was crossing Upper Great Hartlake Bridge when it plunged off into the swollen river. More than thirty people were drowned in the flood that year, a loss that stunned the surrounding communities. The tragedy is remembered to this day by a memorial erected at Hadlow church, a lasting reminder of how dangerous the Medway could become.
The great flood of 1880 brought the water into the heart of Tonbridge itself, with the High Street left under flood. Fields above the town were covered, and locally the waters reached as far as Ramshurst. Yet despite the scale of the damage, the River Medway Company declined to accept any responsibility for the state of the river. It was not until 1910 that a receiver was finally appointed to take charge of it, and the Medway Conservators were subsequently created by an Act of Parliament, giving the waterway a proper governing body at last.
Change followed quickly. On 16 April 1918, an article on flood prevention appeared in The Free Press Tonbridge, describing an ambitious scheme of works then under way. A new weir was built adjoining Tonbridge Town Lock, and the old dry dock was replaced by an enlarged channel fitted with six sluices. The engineer responsible for the works was Mr Stantom, with Mr Jupp serving as foreman. The weir itself was seven feet long and worked automatically, requiring no human hand to operate it. The scale of the construction is striking: twenty-two tons of cement went into it, along with about 150 cubic yards of gravel. Its foundations were laid two feet four inches below the bed of the river, and the height from the overflow level down to the bottom measured nine feet. The Urban Council supported the project with a grant of £200 towards the improvement.
The works extended well beyond the weir. Cannon Bridge was widened as part of the same improvements, and the river was deepened along its whole course. The locks from Maidstone upwards were considerably enlarged, and the benefit for trade was immediate. Where barges had previously been limited to between fifty and seventy-five tons, the new locks allowed craft of 150 tons to make the journey.
Even with these defences in place, the river refused to be tamed entirely. Significant flooding returned during the 1920s, and the decades after the Second World War brought a steady procession of inundations: 1947, 1955, 1958, 1960 and 1963, followed later by 1968, 1974, 1979 and the winter of 2000 to 2001. More recently, the floods of 2013 to 2014 reminded the valley that the threat has never gone away.
Some of these events made national news. When Tonbridge flooded in January 1955, both the Daily Telegraph and the News Chronicle carried reports. The waters spread across the town's playing fields and into the High Street. Among the more curious images of that year was the sight of actors from the Playhouse Theatre using buckets to disperse the water, doing what they could against the flood.
Three years later came a flood of a different character. On 15 September 1958, a wall of water four feet high swept into Tonbridge. It poured over the flood walls that had been built only ten years earlier, overwhelming defences that were still comparatively new.
But it is the flood of September 1968 that lives longest in local memory, for it equalled the great flood of 1880 in severity. The Courier reported the event on 20 September 1968, by which time the town had endured days of misery. On 16 September, the flood water stood chest high in parts of Tonbridge. One incident became a local legend: a Kent & Sussex Courier van was floated clean out of the Bradford Street car park by the rising water. Policemen managed to lash the stricken vehicle to a car park signpost, holding it against the current until the flood receded. A curious footnote to that week concerns Cannon Street Bridge, which had been built fifty years before the 1968 flood, meaning it had already stood through half a century of the river's moods before facing its greatest test.
From the petition of 1600 to the bucket brigades of the Playhouse and the van tethered in Bradford Street, the story of flooding along the Medway is one of a community repeatedly tested and repeatedly adapting. The memorial at Hadlow, the weir at Tonbridge and the enlarged locks all mark stages in the long negotiation between the town and its river — a negotiation that, as recent decades have shown, is still continuing.