Can a £15m health centre help Chatham live longer?

Can a £15m health centre help Chatham live longer?

The first floor of the Pentagon does not look like the future of healthcare.

Large stretches of it are quiet. The upper level was built for a version of Chatham that no longer exists, one where a shopping centre could expect enough footfall, tenants and purpose to justify the amount of space wrapped around it. A few businesses remain. Jesse’s Café keeps going. A Chinese medicine shop has somehow endured. Ascend’s large but quiet coworking space sits on one side. Elsewhere, the floor feels like a building waiting to be told what it is for.

Then you reach the NHS signs.

Inside the James Williams Healthy Living Centre, the contrast is immediate. The space is new, clean and clearly being used. It is also surprisingly warm. While the wider Pentagon felt quiet and cavernous, the newly opened centre was busy with staff, patients and guests gathering for the opening ceremony. The centre is modern and well-equipped, but remains unmistakably a health facility built inside a shopping centre. Natural light is limited, and the wider Pentagon is never far away.

It is one of Medway’s biggest public health investments in years, placed inside one of the clearest symbols of Chatham’s decline. That is what makes it interesting.

The centre was formally opened today, though the real opening happened weeks ago. Bryant Healthcare moved in during March, followed by Maritime Health Partnership. By the time the speeches began, the building was already part of patients’ lives.

That led to the odd scene of a ceremonial opening taking place while people continued turning up for appointments, some of them slightly puzzled by the gathering occupying part of their GP surgery.

Outside, Chatham High Street was not pretending to be an easy place to fix. Within minutes of Local Authority arriving in town ahead of the ceremony, there was an open drug deal outside Primark. The high street remains littered with empty units, struggling shops, but also new homes, regeneration projects and the long-running question of what Chatham town centre is now supposed to become.

The answer, increasingly, is not just retail. The Healthy Living Centre is not another shop trying to save the Pentagon. It is an attempt to put useful public services into a town centre that badly needs them, in a part of Medway where people die earlier than they should.

Earlier this year, Local Authority reported on Medway’s Marmot Place work, which is built around a brutal fact. Men living in the most deprived part of Medway can expect to live ten years less than those in the least deprived. For women, the gap is nearly 13 years.

That is the backdrop to the new health centre.

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Local AuthorityEd Jennings

Speaking to Local Authority at the opening, Medway Council leader Vince Maple described health inequality as a “really stubborn issue” and pointed to the gap between some of Medway’s more affluent communities and the centre of Chatham.

“If you’ve tuned into Cabinet meetings and other meetings, people will often hear me talk about the ten year age gap between some of the outskirts of Medway and central Chatham,” he said.

“So it’s about trying to say, how do we reduce that? This is one way. It’s not the only solution, but this is a really important solution.”

That last part is doing a lot of work. Councils and the NHS are very good at making new buildings sound like answers. Maple was more careful.

“This is not a silver bullet,” he said. “This centre, although it’s fantastic, is not the panacea for all of those statistical challenges.”

He is right. A £15m health centre cannot, by itself, undo poverty, poor housing, low incomes, addiction, food insecurity, weak transport, or all the other things that shape health long before anyone speaks to a GP. But it can make services easier to reach.

The centre sits just inside from Chatham bus station and around five minutes from the railway station. It brings GP practices and community health services into one building in the middle of town.

Bryant Healthcare was the first GP surgery to move in. Maritime Health Partnership followed shortly afterwards, relocating its Same Day Assessment Hub, Frailty Team and Prescribing Hub alongside frontline GP and nursing services. For patients, the promise is simpler access. For the NHS, it is part of the move to shift more care out of hospitals and into the community.

Peter Meers, a consultant musculoskeletal physiotherapist with Medway Community Healthcare, described the centre as an “opportunity”. He said that bringing GP services, community healthcare, and other organisations together under one roof would make it easier for them to work together and develop new ways of treating patients.

“Moving patients’ care away from secondary care, away from hospitals, is a big part of the NHS plan,” he said. “Being able to deliver that in such a fantastic new facility is an honour.”

Some of that is visible in the technology now available on site. Meers pointed to ultrasound equipment that enables diagnostic ultrasound and ultrasound-guided injections to be performed in the community rather than at a hospital. The building also includes a gym space for rehabilitation and exercise classes.

The practical aim is straightforward enough. More things can now happen in Chatham that previously required a trip elsewhere.

The centre has been years in development. Plans for a Healthy Living Centre in Chatham were first announced in 2021. The £15m project was approved in 2024, with construction beginning later that year.

Most of the funding came from NHS Kent and Medway, with Medway Council leading the delivery. The primary work was carried out by Bauvill, a Medway company, turning part of the Pentagon’s first floor into something very different from the retail space around it.

Today’s ceremony included speeches from Medway Community Healthcare managing director Martin Riley, NHS Kent and Medway chief executive Adam Doyle, council leader Vince Maple and deputy leader Teresa Murray, as well as Mayor Douglas Hamandishe. Rochester and Strood MP Lauren Edwards then unveiled a commemorative plaque with members of James Williams’ family.

The centre is named after Medway’s former Director of Public Health, who died in 2024 after a short illness. Williams led public health in Medway for seven years and played a major role during the covid pandemic. Before that, he represented Great Britain in fencing at three Olympic Games.

The tributes today were warm and clearly felt. Speakers returned to his commitment to tackling inequality and his belief that people’s health should not be determined by where they live. That sentiment now has a building attached to it.

Whether the building lives up to the name will take much longer to judge.

Maple said that in “really simple terms,” success over the next decade would mean “reducing the gap.”

That is the only measure that really matters. Not the plaque, the opening event, or even the novelty of putting a major NHS facility above a shopping centre. Not even the relief of getting GP surgeries into newer rooms after years of pressure on local services.

The test is whether people in central Chatham live longer, healthier lives.

That will require far more than healthcare. Next door to the centre, work is continuing on a new community supermarket backed through Medway’s Crisis and Resilience Fund. Social Enterprise Kent is due to run it.

That sits neatly with the council’s Marmot work, because health is not just about doctors. It is about whether people have enough money, decent food, stable housing, good work, safe streets and places that do not grind them down. Chatham has plenty of work to do on all of that.

For decades, the town centre has been treated as a retail problem. Better shops would fix it. Bigger brands would fix it. A refurbished Pentagon would fix it. Another regeneration scheme would fix it. Those promises have not exactly aged well.

The Healthy Living Centre points to a different version of the town centre. Less fantasy about shopping saving everything. More acceptance that places like Chatham need services people can actually use.

That is less glamorous than another glossy regeneration board. But it may be more honest.

The first floor of the Pentagon still feels strange. Too much space, too little life, too many reminders of what the building used to be for. But tucked inside it is now a health centre that is already seeing patients, already doing work, and already asking a harder question than whether Chatham can fill its empty units.

Can it close a gap measured in years of life?

Also...

🚄 A small update on Medway’s missing rail speed record monument, which has now managed to become even more absurd. The National Railway Museum has confirmed to Local Authority that the monument is indeed heading to York, where it will be installed alongside its Eurostar exhibit. It is not there yet, though, because the delivery has apparently been delayed by a low bridge near the museum, requiring a road closure to get the thing in. So, to recap, Medway’s monument to the UK rail speed record was repeatedly vandalised beside the actual high-speed line, removed from Kent, sent to Yorkshire, and has now been temporarily thwarted by a bridge. The museum says it is unaware of any plans to return it to Medway or to create a replacement marker here, which remains a question for Network Rail.

The plaque that couldn’t survive Medway

A rail mystery near Cuxton, a useful budget chart, and the latest Gun Wharf shuffle

Local AuthorityEd Jennings

🏗️ Future Medway reports that plans to demolish The Brook multi-storey car park in Chatham have moved a step closer after Medway Council secured £1.58m from the government’s Brownfield Land Release Fund. The money will go towards demolishing the six-storey, 469-space car park attached to the Pentagon Centre, along with utility diversions and waterproofing works, ahead of plans for around 100 flats on the site. Councillors had already agreed to put £400,000 into the scheme, with Medway Development Company expected to manage the work. The car park has been declared surplus to requirements, partly because of the cost of keeping the ageing structure open, though no closure date has yet been set.

Footnotes

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