00:00Chatham, a place of contrasts, bustling with both development and the telltale signs of urban decline.
00:09Over the course of one year, from December 2024 to November 2025,
00:16more than 4,000 crimes were reported in Chatham Central and Brompton, the ward which covers the town centre.
00:25This is the highest in Kent.
00:28But does this data actually paint the whole picture?
00:33Is Chatham really as bad as its critics make out?
00:37Well, that's a shame that all those nice shots are gone.
00:41I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I have felt unsafe, but I do understand where the
00:47question is coming from.
00:51Counting his stock, Sheikh Islam has run businesses in Medway for decades.
00:56He knows firsthand how difficult it can be in the town centre.
01:02Ben, I'm very scared. You can see I go CCTV camera everywhere.
01:06Still people come in. Sometimes they're begging for money.
01:11They're begging for free food.
01:23But there are works on the way to transform Chatham's reputation. Have a look at that building behind me, part
01:31of the Chatham Waterfront development, providing new residential buildings here in the town centre.
01:37The hope is that this will make it a safer area for people to work and for people to invest
01:44in the future.
01:46Antisocial behaviour exists wherever you let it exist and we're not allowing that to happen.
01:52So we are investing in our town centres.
01:54We are put forward the shopfront grant scheme for businesses so that they can tidy up the area by actually
02:00making it aesthetically more pleasing by upgrading their shopfronts.
02:04There's a lot of work to that effect to make making Chatham's town centre a more inviting place for businesses.
02:09St John's Church has been a success story in Chatham's regeneration, a previously derelict building brought back to life as
02:19an asset for those that live here.
02:21I think sometimes because of its difficult past and particularly kind of we think back to kind of time since
02:28the closing of the dockyards, actually it's been a really difficult time for people and for kind of a couple
02:33of generations of people that have lived in Medway.
02:35And so there's almost, I think for me, a call to look beyond some of that, not to brush it
02:41under the carpet, but to say, well, look at what is happening.
02:44You know, look at the scene behind me and the diversity and the vibrance and the fun and the families
02:49that are emerging and calling this place home.
02:51But those at the church are more divided about whether Chatham has turned a corner.
02:57I've seen quite a lot of crime going on and then now all of a sudden it has cut down
03:01a little bit.
03:02Going down the high street, no, we don't feel safe going down the high street, no.
03:06I think it hasn't got a reputation, but I'm a Chatham girl, so I feel safe here because it's what
03:14I know.
03:15The reputational writing is on the wall here, though not everyone agrees about what it says.
03:21The future for this post-industrial town is very much under construction.
03:27Olly Leader in Medway.
Comments