100 Chatham – Historic Dockyard – Universities – Dockside – St Mary's Island

The 100 is one of those handy, tightly drawn routes that punches well above its weight. In a short circuit out of Chatham Railway Station it ties together almost everything that makes Medway interesting: the Georgian naval ropewalks of the Historic Dockyard, the modern campuses at Chatham Maritime, the shops and cinemas at Dockside, and the curiously self-contained island community of St Mary's. It's a useful local bus, but it's also a genuinely scenic one, with the Medway glinting through the gaps between buildings for much of the way.

Leaving Stop B at Chatham Railway Station, the bus drops down towards the Waterfront Bus Station, where the river opens out beside the pontoon and the swirl of buses and ferries gives a first sense of Medway's busy waterside character. Within a couple of minutes the route is climbing past Fort Amherst, the great Napoleonic-era defensive complex tunnelled into the chalk above the town, its earthworks and gun emplacements still clearly legible from the top deck.

Next comes one of the most photogenic stops on the network, outside the Main Gate of Chatham Historic Dockyard. The ornate gateway, dated 1720, opens onto eighty acres of slipways, dry docks and warehouses where ships from HMS Victory to the Cold War submarine Ocelot were built or are now preserved. Even glimpsed from the bus, the towering covered slips and the masts of the historic fleet make an immediate impression.

The route then threads into Chatham Maritime, the planned quarter built around the old naval basins. Past the St George's Centre, with its landmark chapel converted into a conference and community venue, the bus rolls alongside the universities at Medway, where the campuses of Kent, Greenwich and Canterbury Christ Church share a single leafy site. The next stop sits beside the Ship and Trades, a converted warehouse pub right on the marina, where yachts crowd the pontoons against a backdrop of cranes and converted dockyard buildings.

Crossing onto St Mary's Island, the character changes again. This is a residential community built on the footprint of the old No. 3 Basin, ringed by water on every side, with neat terraces, inlets, footbridges and views back across to the dockyard masts. The bus loops through past the Primary School, Tappan Drive, Goldcrest Drive and Haven Way before retracing its steps through Chatham Maritime, back past the Dockyard gate and Fort Amherst, and into the Waterfront Bus Station for the short hop to Stop A at the station. A small route, but a properly Medway one.