Tales from the Dockyard Church

Ever since we began the dockyard church project, people have been eager to share their memories of the place as a church, social club and local landmark.

Thanks to a generous grant awarded to us by the Queenborough Fishery Trust we’re running an oral history project to collect and share stories from local people relating to the Dockyard Church.

From one generation to another

Allison Young has led the project for the Trust working in partnership with students from The Oasis Academy and specialists from the University of Kent who are training pupils in story gathering skills.

We held drop-in sessions at the Oasis Academy and at Sheerness Library in April 2017, open to anyone with memories of the church or of former family members using it.

Our student partners conducted interviews and captured memories that included how the Captain of the dockyard used his own entrance to attend church, and the drama and destruction of the dockyard church fire.

“They lived in Beach Street in Sheerness, you can go up to the beach from there, that’s where they lived when they got married, they got married in the Dockyard Church, 25th April 1958”

If you have your own memories of the dockyard church – as a church, a social club or as it is now, we’d love to hear from you. We're also keen to build an image archive by making copies of photographs and memorabilia of the church.

If you’d like to contribute memories or images to the archive, please tell us a bit more about what you have using the form.