Medway Council is coming for your furniture

Medway Council is coming for your furniture

Medway Council has issued only ten pavement licences across the towns, which may come as a surprise to anyone who has walked down a Medway high street and encountered rather more than ten sets of tables and chairs.

The council is now preparing to take a harder line with businesses placing furniture on the street without permission. After years of verbal warnings, unclear procedures, and no local system for storing confiscated tables and chairs, officers have drafted a new warning notice and lined up an enforcement team to remove anything left behind.

The new process is set out in a report going to Medway Council’s Licensing and Safety Committee next week, following councillors' previous request for details on how the authority planned to make its pavement licensing policy work in practice.

Pavement licences allow pubs, cafes, restaurants, bars, coffee shops and other food and drink businesses to place removable furniture on certain parts of the highway outside their premises. They were introduced nationally in 2020 as a temporary covid measure to help hospitality businesses use outdoor space more easily, before being made permanent through the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023.

Medway approved its own pavement licensing policy last year. It covers a fairly broad range of businesses, including pubs, cafes, bars, restaurants, snack bars, coffee shops, ice cream parlours, supermarkets, and entertainment venues that sell food or drink.

Only ten licences are currently issued across Medway.

That is the number that makes this more than a comic tale of rogue bistro sets. Outdoor seating is now a familiar feature of parts of Medway, particularly in town centres and high streets where cafes, bars and restaurants spill out towards the kerb whenever the weather allows. Rochester High Street alone feels like it would require more than ten licences, never mind everywhere else.

The council’s report does not say how many businesses are currently putting furniture on the highway without permission, but it does explain why the number might have stayed so low. Until now, officers have relied on visits and verbal warnings, with no written notices and no practical way to remove anything from the pavement.

The result, according to the report, was that businesses, “particularly in busy high streets,” continued to put furniture out without a licence.

This is not especially hard to understand. If the council tells a business to remove its furniture but has no clear way to follow through when the business does not, the furniture is likely to remain where it is.

The new warning notice is intended to change that. Businesses found to be in breach of the pavement licensing scheme would be told to remove the furniture within seven days. Licensing officers would then pass the details to the enforcement team, who would carry out a follow-up visit after the deadline and remove anything still in place without permission.

The council would store the furniture and notify the business, which would have three months to claim it and pay the relevant fee. Anything not collected within that period could be disposed of, sold, or auctioned, with the proceeds kept by the council.

Medway has not yet approved its own removal and storage fees. The report notes that Gravesham, which shares regulatory services with Medway, has already calculated charges of £353 for the initial seizure, including the first seven days of storage, £5 per day thereafter, and £150 if the furniture needs to be dropped back.

So an unlicensed table and chairs on the pavement could become quite expensive quite quickly.

There is an obvious absurdity to all of this, because local government rarely shines brighter than when it has to design a formal process for confiscating a chair. But the underlying issue is not trivial. Pavements are not extra floor space for businesses. They are public spaces, and Medway’s pavement licensing policy contains a long list of conditions that exist for a reason.

Licensed furniture must not block access to premises, fire exits, emergency equipment, drainage, or the highway itself. Businesses need public liability insurance of at least £5m. Customers must be seated, with no vertical drinking. Live music, singing, recorded music, or other amplified sound is not allowed in the licensed area.

The most important rules are about access. The policy requires at least 1.6m of continuous, unobstructed footway to be maintained at all times, and licensed areas must be separated from the remaining highway using disability-compliant barriers with tapping rails or panel edges, colour contrast, and a continuous barrier around the area, except for the access point.

The council says it ran a social media campaign in March highlighting the need for businesses to have a licence, how to apply for one, and the penalties for placing illegal furniture on the highway. After the Easter school holidays, when visitor numbers and tourist trade increase, licensing officers carried out planned days of action focused only on pavement licensing, targeting problem hotspots and areas where complaints or intelligence had been received.

Any business found to be in breach during those visits was served with the new warning notice.

The pavement licensing work also sits alongside a wider council attempt to get a grip on what businesses can place on the highway. Earlier this year, Cabinet approved consultation on a separate Articles on the Highway Policy, covering things like A-boards, shopfront displays, planters, decorative items and goods for sale. Tables and chairs were removed from that policy because they now sit under the pavement licensing regime.

For businesses that already have a licence, little changes. They can keep their furniture outside, provided they follow the conditions. For everyone else, the position is becoming less comfortable.

The unlicensed chairs are on notice.

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IntraFest celebrates the bit between the towns

There are easier places to explain than Intra.

It is not quite Rochester and not quite Chatham, a stretch of old high street that has often been awkward in civic terms, but useful in creative ones. It has become the bit between the towns where small venues, studios, food businesses, artists and odd little projects can spring up without needing to fit too neatly into the polished version of Rochester or the heavier town-centre expectations of Chatham.

Now it is getting a festival.

IntraFest will take place on Saturday 13 June, bringing live music, street food, theatre, art, sailing trips, family entertainment and evening venue events to the stretch between Rochester and Chatham. It is being organised by Intra Community Trust, which describes the event as a celebration of the “unsung backbone of Medway’s fringe arts, culture, and heritage.”

That is a grand way of putting it, but the idea is simple enough. IntraFest is not inventing an identity for this part of Medway. It is taking what is already there and putting it in the street for a day.

The main stage will be at the former Gray’s Car Centre on the High Street, running from 11am to 9pm. A second stage at Decktronix and Ranscombe Studios will run from noon to 10pm, before evening events continue at Poco Loco, 12 Degrees Micropub, The Ship Inn and The Nags Head.

The line-up reads less like a conventional festival bill than a roll call of one particular version of Medway culture. The Solarflares, Lupen Crook, The Singing Loins, The Zac Schulze Gang, Theatre Royal, The Medway Rakes, The Shakes, Mourning Birds, The Pastel Waves, Spider Baby, The Flowing, The Burntwick Smugglers and others will appear across the day, alongside performances from Rochester Riverside Primary School, Dance Alley, MidKent College’s Hot Dog, Pretending People Theatre Company and Play On Words Theatre Company.

In the evening, Poco Loco will host Bear Bones, Sheena and Upcdownc, while 12 Degrees has Little Storping in the Swuff and Wolf Howard. The Ship Inn will host an 18+ drag show from Sandra the Whore of Hampstead Heath, and The Nags Head will have The Sultan and DJ sets from the Decktronix Collective.

This is not a line-up assembled by someone trying to make Medway look slick. It is old Medway music culture, newer bands, theatre groups, DJs, drag, school performances, pubs, studios, illustrators, digital artists, an art market, and sailing trips on Thames historic barges from the restored Ship Pier, all pressed into the same day.

Naturally, there will also be plenty to eat and drink. Poco Loco will bring Mexican street food, churros and cocktails. The Kiki Restaurant & Lounge will be doing smashed burgers and fries. Sweet One will be serving Caribbean BBQ. Three Sheets to the Wind will have beers, ales, cider and bratwurst sausages, while The Dead Pigeon will bring beers, ales and burgers. Medway Scouts will be providing tea and cakes, because not every cultural moment requires a cocktail.

Sun Pier House will host an art market, Mess Room CIC will run arts and crafts workshops, Electric Medway will bring digital art, and illustrators Jio Butler and David Frankum will be involved. Rob Flood’s Music Halls to Medway Sounds photographic exhibition gives the day a useful spine too, linking the area’s older performance history to the Medway sounds that came later.

As a what’s-on listing, this is all fairly straightforward, with a free festival, a strong local bill, and enough food and drink to make movement along the high street steadily less elegant as the day goes on. The more interesting part is what it says about Intra itself.

Intra has become one of the few bits of Medway where the cultural identity feels genuinely lived-in rather than invented for a strategy document. There are venues, studios, pubs, restaurants, creative businesses, old buildings, river edges, awkward corners, and enough roughness left for things to happen without being sanded smooth immediately. It is not a formal cultural quarter, which is probably for the best.

Still, places like this do not look after themselves. The venues, studios, pubs and food businesses that make Intra interesting are not abstract “creative economy” assets. They are actual places with rent, bills, staff, neighbours, licensing conditions and all the usual problems of trying to keep something independent alive in Medway.

That is why IntraFest is worth treating as more than a line-up announcement. It is a useful snapshot of what has gathered in this slightly awkward strip between the towns: the old Medway music scene, newer creative businesses, heritage projects, food and drink, art, theatre, river life, and enough independent activity to make the area feel like something more than the bit you pass through between Rochester and Chatham.

IntraFest takes place on Saturday 13 June. Entry is free, though anyone attempting the full programme of a barge trip, eating bratwurst, taking in the Singing Loins, browsing the art market, visiting a drag show, and a late-night DJ set should probably begin training now.

Footnotes

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