132 Chatham – Rainham Mark – Rainham – Parkwood – Hempstead Valley

The 132 is one of Arriva's cross-Medway workhorses, a circular service connecting Hempstead Valley Shopping Centre with Chatham Waterfront Bus Station via Wigmore, Parkwood, Rainham, Darland and Gillingham. It is a route built for everyday Medway life: school runs, shopping trips and hospital visits, but the loop also stitches together a surprising amount of local character if you ride it as a visitor.

Boarding at Hempstead Valley, the bus pulls away from the covered shopping centre and climbs into Wigmore, a leafy hilltop suburb perched above the M2. From the upper-deck windows there are glimpses across the wooded slopes of Capstone Farm Country Park to the south, before the road drops down through the residential streets of Parkwood, where neat 1970s and 80s housing fans out around the local shopping precinct and St Augustine of Canterbury Catholic School.

The middle stretch is pure Rainham. The 132 threads past Tanker Hill and down Ploughmans Way, joining the A2 Watling Street near Rainham village centre. Here the view is the proper Medway high street: the parish church of St Margaret with its flint tower, the war memorial, the Cricketers pub and the long line of independent shops, takeaways and the Post Office that have grown up along the old Roman road. The Tesco superstore on Bowaters provides the modern counterpoint before the bus rolls on towards Gillingham.

Through Featherby Road and Eastcourt Lane the scenery becomes solidly suburban Gillingham, with the route passing the local landmark of Jezreels, the surviving gatehouse of the famously eccentric 19th-century Jezreelite tower. The bus then curls down past St Augustine's Church, Windmill Road and the back of Chatham railway station before sweeping into Chatham Waterfront Bus Station, with the masts and cranes of the Historic Dockyard visible across the River Medway.

From the Waterfront stand the 132 turns straight back out and retraces its loop, climbing again through Gillingham, Darland and Rainham to Parkwood, Wigmore and Hempstead Valley. It is not a long-distance scenic run, but as a way of seeing how the Medway towns actually knit together, between dockyard, high street and hilltop estate, it is hard to beat.