Intra

Chatham Intra is a bit like a safety pin. It holds the historic city-towns of Rochester and Chatham together, pinned tight against the outside of an acute bend in Kent’s greatest river – the River Medway. Intra’s spine is Watling Street (the old A2) built by the Romans between London and Canterbury, via Rochester – the furthest downstream crossing point of the Medway – it continues onward, towards the continent. Chaucer’s and other Pilgrims have trodden it ever since the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170, and the development of the Pilgrim ‘industry’. Chatham Royal Docks were established in the mid-1500s; and Chatham grew downstream of Rochester, and then spilled into Intra. Deep-water river wharfs brought mercantile trade, Navies, Public Houses and Breweries, Places of Worship, and places to play. Fine Merchant houses sit on broad elevated pavements along the High Street, narrow alleys cutting down to the water and up the hill towards Fort Pitt. Competing railways arrived with the furnace of the industrial revolution, tunnelled, cut-in, and bridged, seething on leviathan-like viaducts across the Medway’s floodplain. This collision of circulation, geography, and trade, catalysed by the inherent velocity of ‘being on the way to somewhere’ created a fascinating urban spatial condition. Now surprisingly forlorn, still a vehicular roadway, albeit significantly bypassed, Intra exists as a non-place; and like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, itself a ‘Framed-Tale’ of narratives- withi- narratives, is set between the poles-apart demographics of pedestrianised central Chatham and Rochester High streets.

Intra now needs some careful thought and consideration, combined with a spark of imagination, to make sense of the myriad heritage- legacy opportunities, to offer a guidebook for its future. This year Unit 1 will extraordinarily collaborate with real stakeholders on a live project – this is your opportunity to frame future planning guidance for a critical part of our region, as part of a wider national initiative that will not only inform your own thesis projects this year, but also guide a generation of regeneration that will follow. Unit 1 will work in collaboration with Kent’s Medway Council, Historic England, and their consultants, HTA Landscape Consultants on the development of a masterplan that will inform Medway’s policy for the area through the adoption of a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) to be published in 2024. The work of Unit 1 will provide an alternative ‘academic lens’ for understanding Chatham Intra and its environs and consider how progressive ‘best practice’ could be applied within this complex urban setting. Your design role is to be ‘visionary radical innovators’ with the agency to have true impact!