THE OLD CITY GASWORKS HAVE GONE. My great-great grandfather worked there as a city coal meter, the Victorian equivalent of a trading standards officer. 

As a small boy I went there with my grandfather as he placed his order for coke for his greenhouse. Now it has nearly all been flattened as the Rochester Riverside development removes the old in preparation for a vast new town north of the railway. 

One of the last to go was the curious corrugated-iron building that stood, until summer 2007, by Rochester Bridge and bore the emblem of Brewsters the printers. I always looked at it from the train it as I hurtle towards my proper job in London. One day I spotted something new (or rather, something old): a large ghostly M peeping though under the Brewsters logo. Who did that signify, I asked. 

I was inundated with replies. Mr Peter Burstoe, of Nickleby Close, Rochester — usually an expert on Medway’s Napoleonic forts — was quick to tell me: MacLynch, scrap metal dealers and steel factors. 

Then came Nigel Sturges, of Haven Street, Wainscott. Mr Sturges — of the respected Gillingham shirt-makers Rayner & Sturges — recalls MacLynch as a place to buy parts of old cars, such as acetylene lamps, bumpers and dashboard clocks. “MacLynch also did much larger recycled metals too,” he recalls. “I can remember seeing great sheets of metal and girders there, which would have been for the building trade.” 

He believes the firm moved in the 1960s and finished somewhere near the river in Rainham. Hmm. Rayner & Sturges. I wonder if our forbears were once in partnership? 

Cllr Ted Baker, a former Mayor of Medway, also has clear memories of the building — because he worked there as a printer. Cllr Baker was a compositor and corrector of the press (comp and reader as we say in the industry) and worked for a number of places before leaving the industry in 1976. He was apprenticed at the Central Printing Company in Wickham Street, Rochester, run by Norman Bushell and has many happy memories of the Delce area. 

“MacLynch were steel factors and moved in the mid-1960s to the old British Oil and Cake mills directly on the other side of the river in Canal Road, Strood,” he says. 

“I moved to that building in 1968, but it wasn’t used just by Brewsters. The old Medway Ports authority, before it was amalgamated, used part of the downstairs for storage and repairs — river buoys, for example.”

 I could, of course, have carried a photograph of the Brewsters building shortly before its destruction, but instead I shall use this view from 1828, which shows how beautiful the landscape was. 

With it comes a warning: This was how it looked. Will the planned Rochester Riverside development look as good? This is the chance to build a stunning revitalisation of the city. 

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