Raybel Charters has been commissioned by Swale Borough Council to undertake a project of physical and social regeneration at Lloyd’s Wharf, creating a heritage-based boatbuilding, leisure and cultural site for Sittingbourne which draws on the town’s great tradition of barge building and sailing.  

Lloyd’s Wharf was constructed in the late 19th Century to service the two paper mills built and operated by Edward Lloyd Ltd at Sittingbourne. Lloyd was a highly prominent newspaper proprietor of his day – the first owner to sell more than a million daily copies of a newspaper.

The wharf was used to bring in raw materials for the paper-making, and to take out rolls of finished paper on Thames barges. It links closely with other parts of Sittingbourne’s industrial heritage – the Sittingbourne & Kemsley Light Railway, with its nearby terminus close to Lloyd’s wharf, and the one still reamining Paper Mill further down Milton Creek, where it meets the river Swale,   These three – wharf, railway, mill – form  a rare surviving and complete landscape of local industrial heritage, which still works today – the railway still connecting wharf to mill.

The regeneration project will complement and be supported by our existing project to restore the Thames sailing barge Raybel, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which is already underway at the wharf. The Raybel project has become an inspiration and foretaste of what can be achieved, but this regenerationproject goes further towards realising a long-term vision for Lloyd’s wharf as a new leisure and cultural quarter – re-connecting the town with its ‘lost’ waterside at the head of Milton Creek.

Today Lloyd’s Wharf is shared by the rebuilt Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum, and local youth organisation, Brogdale CIC, which manages a newly completed skate park at the south end of the site and has a classroom / office. The elements are therefore in place for the wharf to become a vibrant, inclusive addition to Sittingbourne life. This project is essential to knit all these components together.