Mobile car wash in Medway

Medway, town by town

Medway is five towns in a row along the river, a peninsula of villages to the north and a slope of suburbs to the south, and each part parks differently. Here is how a wash that comes to you fits each of them.

Rochester and Strood

Rochester is the old city: the Roman Durobrivae where Watling Street crossed the Medway, with a Norman castle and the second oldest cathedral in Britain. Its High Street and the streets behind it are tight and historic, and on festival weekends the council points visitors at the car parks. Across the bridge, Strood is the working west bank, with the station, the Medway City Estate on Frindsbury peninsula and the roads climbing to the A2.

Chatham and Gillingham

The naval dockyard made both towns, and the terraces built for its workers still line the streets between the Great Lines and the river. These are the parts of Medway with permit zones: the council's Chatham Central zone covers the roads around New Road, and the Gillingham North zone, set up by a 2008 Cabinet decision, runs from 8am to 10pm Monday to Saturday. A space outside your own door matters here, and the point of a wash that comes to you is that you keep it.

Rainham, Hempstead and the Downs suburbs

East and south, the picture is drives, closes and garages: Parkwood above Rainham, Hempstead and Wigmore around the valley, Walderslade and Lordswood in the woods on the Downs. Two cars on the drive is normal, and your washer does both in one visit.

The Hoo Peninsula

North of Strood the A228 runs out to Hoo St Werburgh, High Halstow, Cliffe and the Isle of Grain, between the Thames and Medway marshes. Over half of Medway is rural, and the air out here is damp and salt tinged, which is exactly why a regular outside wash matters.

Parking in Medway, and why you do not need to worry about it

First things first: you do not need to buy a visitor voucher for us. Your washer sorts their own parking, so the only car that needs to be legally parked is yours.

Even so, the rules are worth knowing. Medway Council sells resident permits only inside its controlled parking zones, which it shows on an address map: type your address in and it tells you whether you are in one. Permits last a year, and visitor vouchers cover guests while a permit application is going through. The zones are concentrated in Chatham and Gillingham, where the decisions that set them up date from 2008 onwards and the legal orders for Gillingham and Brompton and for Strood are on the Traffic Penalty Tribunal's register. Everywhere else in Medway, the car is on your drive or on an uncontrolled street, and your washer simply pulls up beside it.

If your car lives in an allocated bay under a block, at St Mary's Island, Chatham Waters or the newer estates at Rochester Riverside, add the access details in the notes when you book so your washer can reach it.

What Medway does to a car

Three things mark a car here. The estuary: the Thames and Medway marshes wrap the north of the borough, and the air off them leaves a salt film that dulls paint and smears glass. The chalk: the towns climb the north slope of the Downs, and dry weather brings a fine white dust that scratches if it is wiped off dry. And the roads: the M2 along the southern edge, the A2 through the middle, the A289 and the Medway Tunnel across the river, all adding brake dust and traffic film to anything that commutes.

Winter adds salt of its own. Medway's gritting season runs from mid October to mid April, with 4,000 tonnes of salt, eight salting vehicles and 502 salt bins, and major roads and bus routes are treated first. Road salt left on paint for weeks is the single most common cause of a dull finish by spring. An outside wash every few weeks through the winter is the answer, and your washer rinses before anything touches the paint.

Who lives here, and the clean that suits

The 2021 Census counted 279,773 people in Medway in 111,458 households, and the council put the figure at 292,655 by 2024. It is car country: 81 percent of households have at least one car or van, 40 percent have two or more, and the average works out at about 1.35 cars a household. Fewer than one home in six is a flat, nearly four in ten are terraces, and two thirds are owner occupied. The variation inside the borough is the interesting part: Hempstead and Wigmore ward has 92 percent of households with a car and half its homes detached, while River ward around St Mary's Island is 58 percent flats.

• Two cars on a drive in Rainham, Hempstead or Walderslade: book both and your washer does them together.
• A terrace in Chatham or Gillingham: Essential Inside & Out at the kerb, and your space stays yours.
• A flat with an allocated bay on St Mary's Island or at Rochester Riverside: Essential Exterior every few weeks against the river air.
• The family car after a weekend at Capstone or on the marshes: Deluxe Inside & Out, with the mud vacuumed out.
• A newer car: a ceramic coating is the long term answer to salt air, chalk dust and road salt.

More on this: what a ceramic coating actually does and why bird droppings and sap damage paint.

Medway is changing shape

Medway Council was formed in 1998 from Rochester-upon-Medway and Gillingham, and it is to be abolished on 1 April 2028 and replaced by a new North Kent unitary authority, with elections to the shadow authority on 6 May 2027. Its Local Plan went to the Secretary of State on 18 December 2025: it has to show how 26,176 new homes will be built by 2041, the council hopes to adopt it by the end of 2026, and two Strood councillors have objected. More homes mean more parking courts, more allocated bays and, while they are built, more site dust on the cars already here. None of it changes how a wash works: the car stays where it is, and the washer comes to it.