Helen Stephenson's Chatham Dockyard Pictures - September 10th, 2006 - Heritage Tour

By visiting the Chatham Dockyards during the Heritage Open Days and prebooking, we were able to go on a special free tour of parts of the Dockyards site which aren't generally open to the public.

This is our guide, Stan.

One of the places that Stan took us was the rope-making loft, which runs the length of a very long building.

We saw the machinery for carding the rope fibres.

Rope-making still takes place at Chatham, and brings in some income besides what is earned from tourism. Brightly coloured synthetic fibres are used as well as natural fibres for making ropes. As rope-making is a lengthy process in a horizontal sense, a bicycle is a useful means of getting from one end of the new rope to the other.

As we went between buildings, we saw some of the outdoor points of interest, including this weather vane; a building with a coat of arms on it; and a ship's figurehead, which is now installed by one of the walkways.

The stables was one area we visited which was definitely not on the standard tourist trail. At the time of our visit in 2006, this area was pretty much un-restored. In fact, we went up one or two rather rickety ladders which definitely wouldn't have stood up to or been safe for hundreds of tourists a day to use.

Another area we visited was the flag-making area. Production had ceased abruptly not long before our visit and the remains of the final day's production were still on the sewing machines.

The Dickens family are associated with the Medway Towns and John Dickens, the father of the author Charles Dickens, worked at the Dockyards. There are a couple of plaques commemorating this.

The final pictures which I took while Stan was guiding us were of the decorations on one of the buildings. They just don't seem to do things like this any more!