When the dock stops working, who owns the plumbing?
A closed waterfront route exposes a responsibility gap, plus next week’s council agenda, news in brief, and a £4m property
A popular boardwalk next to St Mary’s Island has been closed for months after Basin 2 at Chatham Maritime lost significant amounts of water, raising questions about failing dock infrastructure and who is responsible for fixing it as Chatham Docks moves towards closure. Plus, we look at the week ahead at Medway Council, planning, news in brief, and a frankly ludicrous property of the week.
When the dock stops working, who owns the plumbing?
The boardwalk on Basin 2, next to St Mary’s Island, has been closed for several months, and the barrier has the feel of something meant to be temporary but now settling in.
This is not a minor inconvenience route. It is a publicly accessible stretch of waterfront that gets used regularly, the kind of place where people take the long way round on purpose. On a good day, you can look over the edge and watch jellyfish drifting past as if Chatham Maritime is just another stop on their daily commute.
It is shut now, but this is not really a story about a boardwalk.
Chatham Maritime Trust says Basin 2 has lost a significant amount of water, which has created a safety risk to the infrastructure the Trust owns. It says it has carried out stabilisation works and expects the route to reopen in the coming weeks, but warns any reopening could be short-lived without a permanent fix to the underlying problem.
In January, CMT announced that the boardwalk remained closed due to low water levels, “which is outside the control of Chatham Maritime Trust.” In the same post, it said Chatham Maritime Watersports Centre was temporarily closed “for the same reason,” adding, “Apologies for any inconvenience caused.”
CMT has set out to Local Authority what it believes is happening and who it believes is responsible.
CMT confirmed that it believes the fall in water levels in Basin 2 is linked to infrastructure at the interface with Basin 3 at Chatham Docks that it does not own or control. It says the water loss is occurring through the caisson between Basins 2 and 3, and that the dock owner, Peel Ports, is responsible for the caisson.
A basin is not supposed to quietly drain itself. If a structure meant to separate one basin from another is not watertight, the level drops. When it drops enough, the forces acting on anything built along the edge change. That is why CMT closed the boardwalk, and why it says it has had to stabilise parts of the structure.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that Chatham Docks has been moving, in slow motion, towards closure. Peel Ports operates the dock and controls the port infrastructure. A separate entity, Peel Waters, leads the regeneration plans for the wider site once the operational dock has been decommissioned.
This is where a closure on a nice local boardwalk starts to look like a preview of a bigger problem. In Chatham Maritime, the water, the basins, and the edges are not decorative extras. They are engineered spaces that only work if the boring, expensive infrastructure does its job. When it does not, the question becomes what happens to the bits in between.
If older dock infrastructure is decommissioned, who is responsible for it thereafter? Who pays for keeping it maintained? Who becomes accountable for making sure it does not start causing knock-on problems next door?
So far, this story has become a familiar triangle of people explaining that it is not them.
Peel Waters told Local Authority that it is not responsible for the water levels issue and directed questions to Peel Ports. We approached Peel Ports for comment multiple times ahead of this story, but it has not responded, either directly or through its communications agency.
Medway Council’s position is that it is not responsible either. The council told Local Authority this is a matter between Chatham Maritime Trust and Peel Ports, and said its role is limited to facilitating discussions between the parties, including arranging meetings.
There is also a dispute about how long the council has been aware of the problem.
Cllr Habib Tejan, the ward councillor for St Mary’s Island, said he has been seeking clear answers about the closure of the boardwalk and, crucially, who is responsible for fixing the underlying problem.
He said Chatham Maritime Trust has been unequivocal in its position. “The falling water levels in Basin 2 are linked to failures in infrastructure that the Trust does not own or control,” he said. “The caisson between Basin 2 and Basin 3, and the main river locks that regulate water levels, are owned and managed by Peel Ports. The Trust has confirmed that the caisson is not watertight and has been losing large volumes of water for some time.”
Tejan said the boardwalk was closed because the continued loss of water created “a real safety risk to Trust-owned infrastructure,” adding that CMT “has invested additional money to stabilise the structure and is working to reopen the route in the coming weeks.” However, he said the Trust has warned that “without a permanent fix to the port infrastructure, any reopening could be short-lived.”
He also said the history of the issue matters. “What is unacceptable is that residents are caught in the middle while responsibility is disputed,” he said. “The Trust has stated that Medway Council has been receiving weekly updates for over 18 months detailing falling water levels, structural risks, ecological damage and supporting evidence. That means the problem has been known about for a long time.”
Medway Council disputes that description. The council told Local Authority that it has not been receiving direct weekly updates from CMT, though it admitted that officers in planning have been copied on some emails between CMT and Peel Ports.
For residents, this argument about who said what to whom is not academic. The route is still closed. The watersports centre has already been temporarily shut as a knock-on effect. The basin is still not behaving as it should. The organisations closest to the infrastructure involved have settled into a standoff, with one party pointing to an asset outside its control, another declining to respond publicly, and the council positioning itself as a facilitator rather than a body responsible for resolving the underlying problem.
Tejan argues that this is no longer good enough.
“It is now time for Peel Ports to step forward, publicly accept responsibility for the infrastructure it owns, and set out what action it will take to make the system watertight and stable,” he said. “Until that happens, local residents will continue to face disruption and uncertainty caused by assets they neither own nor control.”
Chatham Maritime Trust says it is working towards reopening the boardwalk in the coming weeks, but that without a permanent fix to the caisson between Basins 2 and 3, the underlying issue will remain.
Unfortunately, a significant piece of public infrastructure sits beside Chatham Docks at exactly the moment the docks are heading towards closure, and the site is being lined up for regeneration. That is when questions about inherited infrastructure stop being theoretical. They become practical, expensive, and inconvenient.
Right now, a well-used public route is closed because Basin 2 is losing water via a dock structure CMT says is Peel Ports’ responsibility, while little seems to be done to fix the underlying problem.
So yes, the question is whether the boardwalk reopens.
But the more revealing question is who is meant to take responsibility for the dock infrastructure once the dock is no longer operating, yet it still quietly controls the neighbouring waterfront. If nobody claims it now, they almost certainly won't claim it later, and this closure will not be the last.
Council matters
Meetings next week:
- Tuesday: Cabinet meets to discuss borrowing £45m to buy nearly 600 homes, updates to the petition scheme, refurbishing Gun Wharf, and lots more.
- Wednesday: Planning Committee will virtue signal their position on 690 homes in Hoo despite the decision already being taken out of their hands.
New planning applications:
- Just the three new HMO applications this week, on Canterbury Street and Linden Road in Gillingham, and Grove Road in Strood.
In brief
🌲 Town Hall Gardens in Chatham have been given a £300,000 refresh, including new footpaths, benches, and an upgraded play area.
🛒 Stuart Machin, CEO of Marks & Spencer, talks to One Million Futures about getting young people onto the employment ladder by remembering how he started out pushing trolleys at Hempstead Valley.
🚧 If you think you'd do a better job of filling Medway's potholes, the council is currently seeking a new highways maintenance contract worth £130m.
Property of the week
Upnor Castle House is on the market, but it is not really part of the same housing market as the rest of Medway. This is a Grade II-listed former Admiralty house set in about four acres, with panoramic river views, walled gardens, a swimming pool, an orchard, a tennis court, stables with separate accommodation and even a WW2 bomb shelter, because of course it does. Inside, it has the full period checklist of big reception rooms, shutters, sash windows, working stove fireplaces and a maids' bell system, plus enough historic backstory to fill the brochure twice over. It is the sort of place where '0.8 miles from the Royal Medway Yacht Club' is presented as a normal practical detail, and the EPC rating is F, which feels about right for a house built when warmth was more of a concept than a guarantee.
Events this week
🎭 3 - 6 Apr - Tales from the High Street: Leonards of Rochester // Immersive performance about the rise and fall of Leonards department store in its former location. Store 104, Rochester. Tickets £10.
Footnotes
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