Medway has 'bounced back.' So why doesn’t it feel like it?
Plus a coming budget meeting, this week’s HMO applications, Pride in Medway nominations, a property with river views, and lots more
Centre for Cities says Medway has “bounced back” since 2013, with strong job growth and high employment. We look at why that still does not translate into everyday security, and what the data suggests about pay, skills, housing and the type of economy sitting underneath the recovery.
Medway has 'bounced back.' So why doesn’t it feel like it?
Medway has made it onto an unexpectedly upbeat list, which is not a sentence we get to write often enough. In Centre for Cities’ latest Cities Outlook analysis, Chatham is flagged as one of the small group of places that have genuinely bounced back since 2013. Not in the vague, political sense of turning a corner, but in the measurable sense of stronger growth in economic output and rising living standards compared with the national average.
Before anyone emails to say “Chatham isn’t Medway” or “Medway isn’t a city,” a quick note on what Centre for Cities is actually measuring. Their reports do not use council boundaries. They use Primary Urban Areas, or PUAs. That is their way of defining a city as a real built-up urban footprint and the immediate economy around it, rather than the administrative lines we have drawn on a map. It is basically an attempt to compare functional places that behave like one urban economy, rather than comparing local authorities that sometimes look like they were designed by a committee using a ruler and a grudge.
So when Centre for Cities says Chatham, it is not claiming Medway Council is secretly a city. It is using Chatham as the label for the Medway urban area in the PUA system. It will not match the Medway boundary perfectly, and it is not trying to. But it is still the closest thing in their dataset to the economy most Medway residents actually live inside, which is what matters here.
And on that definition, the numbers are quietly impressive. On the basic question of whether there is work, Medway looks strong. Jobs grew by 18.4% between 2013 and 2023, placing the area in the top quarter of the cities they track. The employment rate in 2025 sits at 78.8%, again comfortably in the top group. This is not a portrait of a place drifting. It is a portrait of somewhere where, for a lot of people, the getting up and going to work part is going well.
Which immediately raises the question that anyone in Medway will recognise. If the charts say we are doing that well, why does it still feel like everyone is permanently one bill away from a stress headache?
This is where things get messier.
The bounce-back is real, but it is not the kind that automatically shows up in your bank account. Centre for Cities’ own data puts average weekly workplace earnings at £677. That ranking sits in the bottom half of their table.
This is where the report stops being a feel-good graph and starts being a diagnosis. Centre for Cities is not just interested in whether a place has jobs. It is interested in what kind of economy sits underneath those jobs. Their argument is that places where growth translates into higher living standards tend to have more high-value private-sector activity, particularly in knowledge-intensive business services. These are the kinds of firms that tend to pay more, scale more, and bring a wider range of decent wages.
On that measure, Medway is not exactly overflowing. Only 9% of local jobs are in private knowledge services, which puts the area well down the national list. When the report counts 'new economy' firms, it does not mean any new business that opened last year. It means firms in the newer, more innovation-led parts of the private sector tend to be linked to higher productivity and higher pay. Medway has fewer of those firms per head than most places in the comparison. You do not need to speak fluent economic development strategy to see what that implies. We have job growth, but too much of it is in parts of the economy that do not reliably pull wages up with them.
That helps explain the emotional mismatch. If you are in work, but the pay is only middling, the bounce-back can exist while your personal version of it feels theoretical.
Skills data pushes in the same direction. The share of residents with high-level qualifications sits in the lower part of the table, while the share with no formal qualifications is also uncomfortably high compared with most cities. That combination matters because it creates a ceiling and a floor. The ceiling is lower because the pipeline of higher-skilled roles and workers is not strong enough to reshape the entire local labour market. The floor is lower because a meaningful minority of residents are still being left behind by the basics.
None of this is a moral judgement about Medway. It is just the shape of the local economy. Lots of people are working hard, lots of employment, but not enough high-paid opportunities spread widely enough to change the mood of the place.
Then you add the cost side of the equation, which is where the 'why doesn’t it feel like it?' question becomes unavoidable. Yes, of course we're going to talk about housing. The average house price is £317,598. The affordability ratio sits at 8.5. That is not London, but it is not cheap either. If you are in a mid-table wage city with mid-table housing costs, the sums still do not feel friendly. You can have good employment numbers and still have many people who feel like they are running just to stand still.
You could tell this story as Medway doing better than it thinks it is, and there is some truth in that. The more useful version is probably that Medway is doing better on the parts of growth that appear in economic dashboards than on those that appear in everyday security. We have work. We even have a kind of recovery. What we have not yet built, at least at scale, is the kind of business mix that turns that recovery into wages that feel like a reward rather than a survival mechanism.
So yes, Medway has 'bounced back,' at least on Centre for Cities’ definition of the local economy. The awkward bit is that a bounce-back that does not lift pay and opportunity widely enough can still feel, day to day, like not very much has changed. The data does not contradict people’s lived experience. But it does explain why the good news turns up as a tidy line on a graph, while the lived version is harder to spot in the places most of us actually notice it.
Council matters
Meetings next week:
- Wednesday: Council meets for its season finale, where the budget for the coming year will be approved.
New planning applications:
- This week's bonanza of HMO applications includes Kingswood Road, Marlborough Road, Park Avenue, and St George's Road in Gillingham, as well as Boundary Road and Institute Road in Chatham.
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In brief
⚖️ Despite threatening a legal challenge to Medway Council's rules restricting the participation of smaller parties, Reform has not pursued it because it would have cost them £100,000.
👷 Utility companies and Medway Council have pledged to do better in response to the ongoing closures on Lower Rainham Road.
🚧 Meanwhile, the 'emergency' gas works closure at Station Road in Strood has been extended until 2 March, but Southern Gas Networks continues to ignore our questions about it.
Ed Jennings
🏆 The Pride in Medway nominations for 2026 have been announced, with many worthy figures included, including a... checks notes... Mr Steven Keevil.
🚓 Cozenton Park Sports Centre is apparently being plagued by anti-social youths on e-scooters.
⛷️ The Winter Olympics have led to a surge in bookings at Chatham Snowsports Centre.
🏏 Kent Cricket has announced a new five-year partnership with King's School in Rochester.
☕ Plans for a Costa Coffee drive-thru on Medway City Estate have been approved following years of delays.
🍺 The Angel pub in Rainham has closed yet again, after cycling through several different landlords and closures over the past few years.
Flawless Cleaning Services, whose YouTube videos see them cleaning up areas for free, tackled foliage that was overrunning a Rochester pavement in their latest video.
Your questions, please.
A lot of our best stories start in the least glamorous way possible. Not with a press release or a grand announcement, but with someone emailing us a simple question. Why is this road closed again? What is going on with that building? Who actually owns it? When did this decision get made, and why does nobody seem to be talking about it?
Those are not small questions. They are the questions that tell you how Medway actually works.
If there is something in your town or village that has been bothering you, confusing you, or quietly getting worse while everyone shrugs and walks past it, hit reply and tell us. It can be as basic as a set of cones that never seems to move, a shop unit that has sat empty for years, a planning notice that makes no sense, or a service that has become unreliable. If you have photos, emails, or documents, even better, but you do not need them. A clear question is often enough for us to start pulling at the thread.
Send us your burning questions, and we'll try and take it from there.
Property of the week
This Victorian semi on New Road in Rochester is on the market for £800,000 and is selling a scale increasingly rare in Medway listings. It is arranged over multiple floors, with a stack of reception space, a large terraced garden, and gated parking, and from the upper levels it offers wide views across the Medway. It is the sort of house that still has rooms that exist simply because that is what Victorian houses did, which is either a delight or a warning depending on your tolerance for stairs and maintenance. This one is less about a single feature and more about the overall feeling of buying a serious house in a serious location.
Events this week
🎸 Sat 21 Feb - Nigel Clark + Chris Helme // Front men of Dodgy and the Seahorses play Pastel Waves club night. Oast Community Centre, Rainham. Tickets £23.
🧑⚕️ Tue 24 Feb - The Science of Trauma and the Body // Talk and Q&A discussion on the physical impacts of trauma. Glassbox Theatre, Gillingham. Tickets £14.
🗑️ Thu 26 Feb - Rubbish Shopping Lists // Eco artist and binfluencer Kieran Poole tells stories from over 1,000 discarded shopping lists. Poco Loco, Chatham. Free.
🗣️ Thu 26 Feb - Medway Council budget meeting // Local politicians squabble over finances. St George’s Centre, Chatham. Free.
Sport this weekend
⚽ Gillingham FC vs Oldham Athletic // Sat 21 Feb, League Two, Priestfield Stadium. One of those straightforward Saturday 3pm jobs where the main objective is simple: win at home and make the table look slightly less annoying.
⚽ Chatham Town vs Welling United // Sat 21 Feb, Isthmian League Premier Division, Bauvill Stadium. Bottom of the table Welling visit the Chats.
Playing away: Chatham Town Women visit Birmingham City (Women’s FA Cup 5th round), Invicta Dynamos visit Solent Devils (NIHL South Division 1).
Footnotes
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