Blue Town is a suburb of the town of

Sheerness Sheerness () is a port town and civil parish beside the mouth of the River Medway on the north-west corner of the Isle of Sheppey in north Kent, England. With a population of 13,249, it is the second largest town on the island after the nearby ...

on the

Isle of Sheppey The Isle of Sheppey is an island off the northern coast of Kent, England, neighbouring the Thames Estuary, centred from central London. It has an area of . The island forms part of the districts of England, local government district of Borough ...

Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...

. It sits on the A249 Brielle Way which runs from Queenborough to Sheerness. It sits just outside the dockyard wall which marks the boundary of Sheerness proper and today is largely industrial in nature.

History

Blue Town grew up alongside the Naval Dock Yard during the

Napoleonic Wars {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Napoleonic Wars , partof = the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars , image = Napoleonic Wars (revision).jpg , caption = Left to right, top to bottom:Battl ...

and gained its distinctive name from the practice of the earliest inhabitants to preserve their wooden houses using blue paint “liberated” from their employers in the dock yard. It began as a small self-contained community built on a very damp and wet place reclaimed out of the marshes. It was a very confined area, a dense triangle of houses and alleyways compressed between the dockyard wall and Well Marsh, and was prone to both flood and fire. At one point separated from Sheerness fort by a moat and drawbridge, the area was enclosed by an earthwork bastioned trace at the end of the 18th century amid growing fears of a French invasion. A Jewish community lived in Sheerness, primarily in Blue Town, for about a century. It is thought they moved from nearby Chatham, in about 1790 and many worked as Navy Agents. The community shrank after the Napoleonic Wars ended and the synagogue was dismantled in 1887.

References

Sheerness Populated coastal places in Kent History of Kent Borough of Swale Isle of Sheppey {{Kent-geo-stub