Day 8/10: Blue Town Heritage Centre AGAIN! a bench and the newspaper

I'm returning to Bluetown Heritage centre – the first place I visited on the island - as I spent all my time in the postcard archive last time and didn't get to properly explore, which is basically sacrilege. I tell myself to go around the displays, don't get drawn into any of the archival rooms. I start off well, being given a tour of downstairs including the music hall at the back which has recently seen a successful return of shows post-Covid. Then I go upstairs to the maritime museum and this reminds me Malcolm showed me this room before and the letter that the US navy sent saying that the Richard Montgomery's sunken remains had not in fact been left in the water off Sheerness (LIE!).

This place is fun – there's a great mix of real and replica objects. The cannon balls are real, the canons are not (as demonstrated by the guide who picks up one of the canon balls and shows me how he can't drop it down into the canon because its hole is too small). The real battered remains of the figurehead whose gleaming replica I've already encountered at the entrance downstairs is laying high up on a shelf in the semi dark out of reach. There are models with cotton wool clouds of explosions and a replica captain's cabin with a swinging hammock that doubles as a coffin if it goes pear-shaped.

Downstairs is more fun with a Victorian school room mock up with real Victorian school tables, a Sunday school with a real magic lantern projector, which I get turned on for me – the plate showing Noah's ark is pretty stunning. There's also an outside toilet with a history of wiping your bum and 1940s parlour. I then walk past an innocuous looking room, before hearing a voice calling me inside. Uh oh! Inside I meet two lovely people who are doing family histories and have put together a “House Through Time” folder for a specific house in Blue Town. Using the census records we look at the occupants through the 1800s and 1900s and see the changes from a slop seller to tailors, to an outfitter to a butcher to a butcher's shop... I marvel at the names and places that these people are from – hardly any of them are from Sheppey at all, they've moved around for work and ended up here because of the dockyards.

A punter enters for his family history appointment so I start having a look through the archive. Here you can find out all about the history of the Sheerness Economical Society – the first co-operative workers movement, whose ideas founded the Co-op. It's a really exciting part of local history that Jo Eden's told me about while we ate breakfast butties and I told her she should be an Ambassador for the island and that universities should pair up their social history students with her and they could research together.

There's also a section on Shurland Hall, the Tudor gatehouse that me and Jo went to see in Eastchurch but we could only see the chimneys...

I get totally swept away by the map file...

And by these photo albums donated by a local photographer charting what must be pretty much day to day life in Sheerness as each album only holds two months-worth of photos.

I like these photos very much. The association of a mannequin wearing a bikini and a real life bather is smart but also creepy because of the actual objectification of women. There's an object next door in the Victorian school room that I need to get in touch with the museum about because I believe it objectifies black Africans in the context of Victorian missionary trips.

I go to check in at the caravan via Whelan's garden ornaments because Lucy from Ideas Test sent me some pictures of it and it's just around the corner...

After check in in I sit on this bench for 15 minutes to see if anyone will stop and talk to me. Nobody does and I start thinking that instead of being an initiative to stave off isolation this might actually be for the benefit of the introverts who know they're safe to sit pretty much everywhere else without being talked to. I wonder what other people think about this sign. I should ask them.

I buy this week's Sheerness Times Guardian and stretch out on the pebbles. Jo Eden gave me a copy on my first day here and said it's a good way to get to know what's going on. She was so right. I start off ringing things I could do tomorrow...