Sittingbourne Council Offices to Crown Quay

I made another sojourn yesterday along the length of Crown Quay Lane to the head of Milton Creek. A shopping trolley has made its home on the verge at the turn to Bayford Court and a paper Costa Coffee cup stuffed full of foil wrappers and the remains of a sandwich is jammed into the ivy clad mesh fence nearby. A few yards on, a large suspicious bundle of  something white looks like another  new arrival, dumped almost directly opposite  a few wild crab apples hard by the galvanised pointed fence on the left of the road.

Imagine my surprise as I approached the more desolate end of the lane to discover Erika’s ‘Hungarian Bufet’, recently opened by Erika and her partner Lajos to purvey wonderful Langos (a kind of pancake with sour cream and cheese) and Gulash for £3.  They live in the caravan next door and are slowly clearing up the fly tipped rubbish which has accrued there over the last decade to make it their home.

Just beyond this oasis, the area of the former Crown Quay, remains a fascinating mixture of tipped rubbish and colonising ‘wasteland’ plants. Buddleia has made its home inside an old lorry tyre (and is in great profusion elsewhere) and the quayside is awash with a wonderful yellow swath of golden samphire. According to Mrs Greive’s ‘A Modern Herbal’ of 1931 this plant  is rare in Britain, but plentiful on the Isle of Sheppey. It is all the more poignant to note the nearby drum of  evil looking acrylate, fermenting and evaporating in the summer sunshine beside the wreck of a plastic car and beneath a solitary cypress tree.