As we get closer to winter, our thoughts naturally turn to comfort, to the season of merriment and relaxation and, of course, home.
But feelings of home are sometimes hard to define. Is it where you currently hang your hat, or where you came from or where you live?
My original home is in the South East of the UK, in the county of Kent. I grew up in a place called Sandwich.
Sandwich? You laugh. Sandwich? There’s a place called Sandwich?!
Yes, there’s a place called Sandwich and it’s not far from a place called Ham (I kid you not), so close that it’s signposted.
Write What You Know, They Say
I first started to write about Sandwich in the late 2000s. While I’d written short fiction in my twenties, I had an itch to create a novel and I wanted to base it there. I’d decided that I wouldn’t have enough interesting life experience or enough to say before I was forty years old but I started anyway and got it to around sixty thousand words with not much of a plan. It wasn’t very good, a bildungsroman about a young man growing up in a small rural town in South-East Kent. So I did what any self-respecting writer does, I parked it and did a job of work for the next fifteen or so years while I raised my family.
Post-COVID, after a misadventure as a manager, I rediscovered reading for work. Reading about our beloved software business and discovering how much the writing around our industry had matured. It was so interesting and varied, simply inspirational. A whole slew of business books and thoughtful writing had filled in the gaps, leaving me inspired.
The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Manual, Accelerate, Team Topologies all made me want to write. Write, they tell you. Just write, the inspiration will come. So I wrote. First, I wrote this blog in an unconnected and slipshod fashion, but at least consistently. Slowly I formed ideas, but while I loved how things had progressed both in theory and practice in software engineering, I was also confused as to why my day job felt and acted pretty much the same as it always had for the previous decades. I was a software engineering manager without a cause, a DevOps engineer using the same skills that I’d learned thirty or more years previously. Is this where we are?
Sandwich and the Dutch Connection
Sandwich has always been a mystery. The town stands in a mud flat, a few miles from the coast, the brown Stour river snaking its way across the salt marshes towards it. St Peter’s Church, with its unique spire, is an unmissable beacon for miles around.
The church is 900 years old. Every night, to this day, it rings out the 8 p.m. curfew over the town- the pig bell – allowing residents to release their pigs into the streets. The bell’s noise dominated my childhood, yet I hear tell that incomers to the area now want to silence it. Tradition doesn’t die just because people say it must.
Much of today’s building dates from 800 years ago, though it has been altered many times. The handsome tower with its distinctive onion dome top is a 17th-century addition – built by Flemish protestant refugees, in the style of their homeland churches.
St Peter’s Church – Courtesy of the Visit Churches Website
The connection to the Dutch cannot be missed in Sandwich. Settlers built the church dome and many of the houses that stand to this day. At various times in my youth, I was lucky enough to live in a few of the houses in the town. On Strand Street, I lived at three timber-framed properties dating from the 16th and 17th Centuries. Number 21, later at number 35 and finally at the Admiral Owen pub in the early nineties, before I left for University. My mother liked to move house.
These houses have distinctive Dutch style gables. It seemed almost written in the stars that I would move to the Netherlands and write a book about the two countries joined together in this place.
The Wantsum Channel and Sandwich to Sandport
In February of 1287, the South England Flood caused great destruction to the Kentish and Essex coast. Among many towns washed away or destroyed, it also caused silting in the former Wantsum Channel that separated the Isle of Thanet from the Kent mainland. Sandwich stood on the Wantsum Channel, a wide haven, a powerful safe harbour for large boats, including the English navy. Following the flood, the silted channel was no longer passable for great ships at least initially from the North. Over the following centuries, the channel narrowed further, the ships stayed away and Sandwich’s importance in the area steadily declined. While the full story is a little more nuanced than the version I present in Human Software, essentially that was an end to Sandwich as a major port in the area. A fascinating blog uncovers more of the history and disappearance of this mysterious waterway.
When I started writing Human Software, I knew instinctively that I wanted to have Sandwich as a great power again, a place where business happened, but perhaps not at the levels it had once seen. Therefore, Sandwich had to have access to the sea. The Wantsum Channel needed to rise again. Secondly, I wanted to give the place a name that would reflect it’s greater status and also make a nod in the direction of the Netherlands. Zandvoort on the east coast of the Netherlands still exists, and there are many references to historical Zandpoorts in the Netherlands and Flanders. I chose Sandport as the name to give a British twist and a nod to these places and draw a connection between them.
Industry Equals Hope
If a region is defined by its industry, by the famous names it accrues as residents, and by its successes and failures, then it’s fair to say that South East Kent had more than its share of failure. The final piece of the puzzle was to bring a sense of hope to an area which I feel, historically, has been overlooked.
South-East Kent lost its coal mines in the eighties, it has a mainly agricultural industry as its mainstay (as a kid I would go to ploughing matches), but it has a world class airport (Manston), it has excellent connection with Europe with the cross channel ferries out of Dover, Ramsgate, the Eurotunnel from London. Previously it also had the hovercraft from Pegwell Bay and later Dover. But the ferry companies were always changing hands and going bust. The hovercraft of Pegwell Bay stopped in the late eighties – my sister a stewardess on them, my brother a First Officer and Navigator. They flew from Dover for years more but even the diversification in the form of the modern Seacats couldn’t save Hoverspeed.
Large industry has come to Sandwich though. Companies such as Petbow – an engineering company started and run in Sandwich for over fifty years, left in the 1990s. Pfizer pharmaceuticals once had a thriving research centre in Sandwich, reduced their employees from around eight thousand to a quarter of that in the late eighties and even threatened to leave. While it’s still there in a much reduced capacity, there are ongoing fears that it might reduce still further.
Pfizer employed 8,000 people here not so long ago, its payroll in east Kent comfortably outnumbered the number of people who actually live in Sandwich – about 5,000.
A Sustainable Future
I believe that artists are always striving for a connection to home and a connection to something relevant. When you start a project, whatever it might be, you hope that somehow it will connect you with your roots, your family, your friends, your home, and help you see current events more clearly.
Businesses bring value to the local economy in ways that outnumber simple opportunity or employment. While the ongoing neoliberal political attitudes of the 80s and 90s clearly didn’t prove a win for rural communities like Sandwich and Thanet, large businesses still bring money to the local economy through their gravity. They pull in money yet often they fail to spread it around. In the early 90s, I lived in a pub, and we relied on trade from Pfizer employees. In the book, I wanted to represent the failure or withdrawal of a large business as a blow to the local economy. Therefore my fictional company, Gerbach, had to do the unthinkable – not only pull out from the local area as an employer but also do more to ruin it ecologically and in other ways.
Local Investment
When I visited Sandwich and Deal recently, I found a place that has benefitted from incomers money. A place almost unrecognisable from where I grew up. London money has forced house prices up and made the Saturday market in Deal thrive again. But what happens when South East Kent isn’t fashionable anymore? What happens when the tearooms and coffee shops are empty like for so much of the last thirty years? Where’s the substance behind the facade? Is Deal’s fate simply to be a commuter town? Another London-next-the-Sea?
Thanet and South-East Kent need proper industry, not just opportunities for wealthy incomers to spend their pounds. Perhaps what it needs is a Gerbach, but one more sympathetic to the locals. Perhaps it needs someone to take a chance, someone with a mission and a plan. If I had the money and the business know-how, it might be me, but alas all I know is the nuts and bolts of computers and software, and how to write a line or two.
Where are the local success stories? Am I ringing the bell too soon? I’d love to hear from you if I’m missing something.