Postscript—Post Brexit

The place where Ewe Johnson lived out the last ten years of his life is a real island, but only just. Looking out over a sea known before the First World War as the German Sea, the Isle of Sheppey is surrounded by salt water on all sides. Trailing suction hopper dredgers on the Swale appear to be more or less permanently labouring to keep it that way, ensuring that the land- facing side of the island remains resistant to the silt that has swallowed up the former isles of both Grain and Harty and other places in this part of the world. Lydd, Romney, Oxney and Thanet—they were once all islands. At the same time the prevalence of London clay causes landslips. Before sea defences stabilised things, shorelines on the other side of the island were not extending but disappearing, in some places at a rate of three metres a year. If you want to get to the island you have no choice but to leave the mainland behind, a fact often said to shape island identities and important to most versions of writing about this place and the estuary generally. The boundedness of things is registered by the fact that almost all accounts— antiquarian, historical, archaeological, literary, sociological or otherwise— have had something to say about the business of ‘crossing over’. Edward Hasted, an eighteenth-century antiquarian who lost a considerable family fortune compiling a twelve volume history of Kent, described in great detail how the Kingsferry ferry boat was once hauled from shore to shore by a cable measuring one hundred and forty fathoms, which ‘being fastened at each end’ across the Swale, ‘serves to move it forward by hand. On the side oppo- site to the island there is a small house of stone […] erected by one George Fox, who having staid a long while in the cold, waiting for the boat, and being much affected by it, built it to shelter others from the like inconvenience.’ That crossing was maintained by a tax on local landowners at a rate of ‘1d for each acre of fresh, or ten acres of salt marsh.’1 Such details, typical of writing about the estuary at the time, often domestic and small in scale, have reap- peared in virtually every island history since, the familiar markers of entry into this particular place.

1 Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol.6, (Can- terbury: 1797–1801), 210–11. The complete work was some 7,000 pages and 3 million words long,

In Hasted’s time there would have been other travel options open to eco- nomic and military networks and to residents and visitors to this part of the estuary—another ferry at Harty, coastal routes and the river routes up and down the Medway and the Thames. These days the port and dockyards once central to the modern development of the estuary have reopened after their closure in 1960, but they are privatised now and operate no public transport routes. Once an important site of national defence and a royal port, Sheerness is now, along with Chatham, Liverpool and Clydeside, a Peel port, owned not by the State but by an international conglomerate and there is only one place where the crossing from the mainland can be made formally. The Kingsferry Bridge is a solid, reliable looking structure built in the 1960s. In Wide Open Nicola Barker describes it as a modernist mess, ‘a great, concrete multi-storey car park, but roofless. A monstrosity. A giant.’2 In another reality it combines a footpath, rail track and road bridge with a moving section—the latter, powered by an underground electronic motor, rises over twenty-five metres allowing oversized marine traffic to pass underneath. The opening and closing makes for quite a spectacle, but it takes time to complete the full cycle. The delay used to cause bottlenecks in road traffic, these made worse by the fact that the Kingsferry Bridge had only one-lane in either direction. To speed up communication links for the redeveloped port a new crossing was planned under New Labour—a massive construction that now curves in a miraculous arc over surrounding water and land to reach a height of no less than thirty-three metres, so high that it takes you almost over the top of the towers of the old bridge which is still there alongside the new structure. This new multi-lane crossing carries the bulk of traffic to and from the island and almost all the industrial traffic coming from the redeveloped port—26,000 odd vehicles daily in all including car transporters hauling imported Peugeots, VWs and Hyundais and other industrial vehicles carrying fruit, ‘forest products’, steel and liquefied natural gas off to the M2 motorway and beyond. The New Sheppey Crossing is a very twenty-first-century-looking structure. Although some have found it ‘bland’, just another typical steel and composite bridge ‘lacking colour and character’, others have found it fresh, modern and elegant. Far from being a remote imposition, it has been said that the unusual colours of the materials from which it has been constructed allow the bridge to ‘immerse itself into the surrounding area gently’. It appears ‘integrated’. The simple and elegant design renders the bridge easily understandable rather

2 Barker, Wide Open, 44.