Isle of Sheppey By Heart: Three Masts, Bridge Queues & Island Memories

For eighty-two years you could stand on the sea wall at Sheerness and see them. Three rusty masts sticking up out of the estuary, the first thing you looked for every time you got to the front. This autumn they came down. One Sunday morning you sit on the wall with your flask, look out, and there's nothing there. That's how this book started. Not as a guide. As a list of everything on this island that only lives in people's heads now, written down before it goes the same way. Who it's for Born-and-bred islanders from Sheerness, Minster, Queenborough, Eastchurch, Leysdown and Warden Anyone who moved off Sheppey years ago and still calls it home The families who spent every August at the Leysdown camps and never forgot it Anyone who has sat in a bridge queue with a car full of sand and wet towels Newer islanders who want to know what the old boys in the pub are on about What's inside The Montgomery, properly. The week she ran aground in August 1944, what was really on board, the stories every Sheppey kid was told about what would happen if she went up, and where the masts have gone now. Blue Town. How a town got its name from paint "borrowed" from the dockyard, the Criterion, and the streets your nan would still recognise. The bridge goes up. The Kingsferry queues, the day the island got cut off, and Frank Spencer stranded on top of it at Christmas 1975. Leysdown in August. The holiday camps, the Coffee Pot, the amusements and the London families who came back every year for decades. Where flying started. The Wright brothers at Muswell Manor in 1909, the Short brothers' sheds on the marsh, and why Eastchurch should be far more famous than it is. The grotto nobody notices. Built by the Ship on Shore from barrels of cement that washed up off a wreck and set solid in the sea. Minster, Queenborough and Harty. The abbey on the hill, the town named after a queen, and the pub at the end of the road where the marsh meets the Swale. Swampies. Every joke the mainland ever made about the island, and the honest answer to each one. The quiet minute. Exactly where to stand at first light to look out at the spot where the masts used to be, with directions. What it isn't It isn't a tourist brochure and it doesn't pretend the island is perfect. The hard bits get told straight. It's written for people who love the place, not people who've never been. Who wrote it Lukas Wander's nan was born in Blue Town. He spent every childhood summer on the island and moved over for good five years ago, into her bungalow in Minster. This book is her stories, her photos and the memories of everyone who'd stop and talk to him, written down before any more of it disappears. Free updates for life If one of the masts does come home to Sheerness, the book gets a new chapter, and you get it free. A lovely Christmas present for the mum, dad or nan who left Sheppey years ago and still talks about it. Get Isle of Sheppey By Heart This is a digital ebook (PDF) by Lukas Wander, around 60 pages across 20 chapters. It's emailed to you straight after you buy and opens on any phone, tablet or computer. You can print it at home too if you'd rather have it on paper. Buy now