Local & Reliable Skip Hire in Gillingham.

Local area guide

Skip hire in Gillingham

Gillingham is a town in Kent, sitting on the south bank of the Medway estuary, with a population of around 105,000 — the largest of the Medway towns. It was a small fishing and farming village until the mid-nineteenth century, when the expansion of Chatham Dockyard onto Gillingham land transformed it. The dockyard's growth, and the building of the Royal Naval Barracks and the Royal Naval Hospital here, turned Gillingham into a substantial naval town within a generation.

Chatham Dockyard, much of which lies within Gillingham's boundaries, was one of the most important naval shipyards in the world for four centuries. HMS Victory was built here, launched in 1765, and the yard constructed over 500 ships for the Royal Navy before closing in 1984. Its historic core is preserved as The Historic Dockyard Chatham, one of the most complete Georgian dockyards anywhere, with the Ropery — a quarter-mile-long rope walk still making rope by traditional methods — among its most remarkable survivals.

Gillingham has a notable place in the history of the Royal Engineers, whose headquarters and museum are at Brompton within the town. The Royal Engineers Museum holds the Duke of Wellington's map of Waterloo and a substantial collection covering military engineering worldwide. Gillingham is also the birthplace of Will Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan, who in 1600 became a samurai and adviser to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu — a life that inspired James Clavell's Shōgun. The Will Adams memorial clock tower stands on Watling Street.

Gillingham Football Club, founded in 1893 and playing at Priestfield Stadium, is the only professional league club in Kent. The town sits on the A2 and A289 with the M2 close by, and Gillingham station gives services to London Victoria and St Pancras via High Speed in around 50 minutes. Neighbouring communities include Chatham, Rainham, Rochester, Brompton, Hempstead and Wigmore.

Housing in Gillingham is dominated by the dockyard expansion, with dense Victorian and Edwardian terraces across the older town built for naval and dockyard workers, alongside interwar and post-war estates at Twydall and Wigmore, and substantial modern development including the large Chatham Maritime scheme on former dockyard land. Property is among the more affordable in Kent, and the High Speed link and the Medway regeneration programmes have driven significant new development and rising interest from London buyers.