Medway dodges another licensing hearing
Plus the Gun Shop (and more) for auction, a quick recap of Medway Question Time, news in brief, and more
We swear we aren’t pivoting to only covering licensing issues, but the issue leads again this week as a Medway councillor objects and then changes their mind about a new B&M in Chatham. Further down, we have news on how you can own the old Gun Shop and other notable Medway properties, we take a quick look back at our Medway Question Time event last week, and run through the news in brief. Let’s get to it.
Medway dodges another licensing hearing
Last week, we wrote about the slightly absurd licensing hearing to decide whether or not Tesco should get a licence to sell alcohol in Rochester. We won’t repeat the story again here, but we did promise an update this week.
The update is that there is no update. Despite the meeting over a week ago, the public is still not allowed to know what the panel decided after the press and public were kicked out of the room because of the opaque way these decisions are made.
To be precise, the panel have five working days to let the applicant know the decision, which given the bank holiday is this coming Thursday, but in reality, the panel of councillors would have made the decision following the initial hearing.
We asked Medway Council what the outcome of the discussion was, and they have so far been unable to provide an answer.
So imagine our delight when looking through the Medway Council meeting calendar to discover that another licensing hearing had been scheduled for next week.
Who was the problematic culprit this time? An off-licence in a residential street? Another supermarket trying to open in a town without any?
Nope.
That’s right, B&M. The weird all things to all people retailer with a headache-inducing logo who has been marching across Medway in recent years.
Their latest store is set to replace Homebase in Chatham, which is due to become the biggest B&M in our towns by some margin.
For context, the store is located within Horsted Retail Park, an edge of town retail development with an airport on one side and a dual carriageway on the other. Surrounding stores include Currys, Pets at Home, KFC, and most relevantly to this, Home Bargains and Aldi.
Given Aldi is a supermarket selling alcohol and Home Bargains sells roughly the same mix of products as B&M are both on the same estate, it would seem odd if there was a problem to be found in the new store’s application. It should also be noted that, unlike Tesco last week, the store is not located within a Cumulative Impact Policy area.
So, exactly what triggered a licensing hearing on B&M’s application?
One objection from one councillor on one aspect of Medway’s licensing objectives.
Fort Horsted councillor Trevor Clarke objected to the application on the grounds of ‘prevention of public nusience.’ His main complaint seems to be that B&M requested a licence that allowed them to sell alcohol between 7am and 11pm, when Aldi is limited to 8am to 10pm. Cllr Clarke in his objection seemingly wanted to make sure B&M were not allowed that extra hour on either end.
Now, there is a certain logic here to Cllr Clarke’s position, but his objection also raised not wanting residents to be disturbed on Sundays despite the fact that a store the size of B&M would be legally unable to open for more than six hours. It also ignores that JD Gyms operates on the site 24 hours a day, and KFC is open until 11pm every day, including Sundays. It also ignores that there is not a single B&M in the entire country that opens after 10pm, so it seems unlikely that would likely to start here, even if the licence does give them the wiggle room.
Since the agenda was published (and we started putting together this piece), the hearing panel has since been cancelled, after Cllr Clarke withdrew his objection. Whether someone had a word or he just thought better of it is unclear, but it does raise questions about how hearings can be forced over a single objection about one very small part of an application.
So alls well that ends well in this case, and the giant new B&M will open on 6 June.
Still, with two licensing hearing panels provisionally on the Medway Council calendar for May, and a number of potentially controversial licence applications in the pipeline, the panel will likely get another chance to make a decision again soon.
Your chance to own the Gun Shop (and more)
If you’ve walked through the part of Chatham High Street around Sun Pier in the past decade, you’ve probably noticed the rather run down shop with a rather bold sign: The Gun Shop. The former shop and Pulse nightclub underneath have sat empty for so long that the building is falling apart. Indeed, as part of a planning application last year that proposed converting the building into a mixed-use residential/commercial unit, structural issues were raised.
As is often the way of such things, now planning permission has been obtained to convert the building into a shop and seven flats, the owner is trying to sell up to let the actual work become someone else’s problem.
The building will go to auction next week with local auctioneers Clive Emson, where a price of £400,000+ is being proposed. It doesn’t sound like a bad price given the scale of the building on offer, though the listing does raise some concerns: ‘Viewing will be external only as we understand the stairs have been replaced with a scaffolding tower providing access to all the floors.’
Something of a fixer-upper, then.
The Gun Shop isn’t the only interesting Medway building going to auction next week. Two properties on Rochester High Street are on offer. Penfold House near Rochester Bridge is up for around £220,000. The building has had various tenants over the years, from the original Deaf Cat to Bruno’s in the past to The Mixologist cocktail bar more recently. Indeed, this writer had an office on the top floor of the building back in the heady days of 2011.
Further along Rochester High Street, the building housing Fieldstaff antiques is also up for auction for around £220,000. The auction includes both the extensive shop and three-bedroom flat above, though don’t have any thoughts about using it yourself: The building comes with Fieldstaff who have a long-lease until 2032.
Thanks for supporting Medway Question Time
Thank you to everyone joining us for Medway Question Time at MidKent College last week. We love putting on these events to engage with the local community on the issues they care about. Getting people to come out on a Wednesday night to listen to a panel discussion isn’t the easiest sell, but we greatly appreciate that our readers are up for exactly that sort of thing.
An additional thank you to our panel: Medway Council Leader Vince Maple, Leader of the Opposition George Perfect, Chatham Memorial Synagogue’s Dalia Halpern, and Chatham Historic Dockyard’s Richard Morsley. Politicians like Vince and George are obviously used to this sort of thing, but Dalia and Richard gamely threw themselves into things, offering their own unique insights on the issues raised.
It was a good discussion, with a well-rounded set of questions, covering what the council should and shouldn’t do, the state of Medway Hospital, food, further education, the level of culture in Medway, and, of course, potholes.
This is the third time we’ve done a Medway Question Time, and we’ve slightly tweaked the format each time. Getting the balance right between panel discussion and audience participation remains tricky. We did manage to take some points from the floor during this one, and it’s something we’ll keep trying to refine in the future.
We hope to have a recording from the event available soon for those unable to attend on the night, and we’ll be back with another Medway Question Time event later in the autumn. Between now and then, we’ll announce a special summer event exclusively for our paid supporters, so keep an eye out for that.
In brief
🚗 Medway Council has apologised after an disabled person was fined 18 times for driving through a School Street in Walderslade despite the council exempting them. It tooks months of letters and court orders before the council managed to sort things out.
💷 Nearly £20m in developer contributions intended to improve local services is going unused in Medway. The Section 106 system moves horrendously slowly and a better process for using such money is long overdue.
🍻 The Coach and Horses pub in Strood has suddenly closed after the landlord returned the lease. Stonegate Group is now looking for a new operator if you’ve ever fancied running a Medway pub with nearly half a million turnover.
🧑⚕️ A Chatham-based care company has been placed in special measures by the Care Quality Commission following an inspection. Inspectors found Sambhana Care inadequate in all areas, saying incidents were hidden, medicines were not managed safely, and at least one patient was left unattended for days.
🚒 Kent Fire and Rescue have requested the a licence review of the Red Dog pub in High Halstow. They assert that the venue has not complied with a previous enforcement notice.
🍔 KMTV have been to Chatham High Street to talk to Burgerman Serj, who has turned his burger stand into something of a TikTok hit.
More Authority
Francis Annan is a screenwriter and director of the Daniel Radcliffe starring Escape From Pretoria, which has been riding high on the Netflix charts since it landed on the platform. We sat down and talked with the Medway-based filmmaker to discuss what brought him to Medway, the industry's challenges, what a Medway set film would look like, and much more.
“They are movies that will at some point get made"
Earlier this year, we spoke to director and Medway resident Francis Annan about his film Escape to Pretoria when it became available on Netflix. We wanted to go deeper, so Steven sat down with him in the Mast and Rigging pub in Gillingham to talk about what brought him to Medway, his family connection to Ghana, the question that almost caused an existential crisis, and what a film about Medway would look like.
It’s a full Medway Council meeting week, and it’s going to be a long one. If you’d like to join us so we don’t suffer alone, we’ll cover it all our Substack Chat for our paid supporters. There’s currently an offer to get 20% off an annual subscription, mainly because the Authoritymobile (my Nissan) is going into the garage this week for the best part of £800 worth of work.
Footnotes
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Music that soundtracked the creation of this edition: There Is Nothing More Frightening Than The Passing Of Time by Superman Revenge Squad, Waited Up Til It Was Light by Johnny Foreigner,