Mobile car wash in Cliffe and Cliffe Woods

Parking reality

Drives in the Woods, narrow streets in the village

Cliffe Woods is a village built into an ancient wood, mostly in the decades after the war, and its roads of closes and avenues named for the old manors, Mortimer's Avenue and Englefield Crescent among them, were laid out with a drive at the front of every house. That is the easiest wash there is: the car stays on your own drive and nobody has to move anything. Cliffe itself is older and tighter. It was a port and a town in the Middle Ages, and the streets below St Helen's church are narrow, with parking limited; there is a car park by the church and the Six Bells, and Medway Council's rule is that resident permits are only sold inside its controlled parking zones, which it shows on an address map.

Whichever village you are in, your washer parks where they can and carries the kit to the car, so a narrow lane or a shared yard is no problem. Tell us where the car is in the notes when you book, and if a gate or a code is involved, that too.

The neighbourhood plan

The parish is writing its own neighbourhood plan, and Medway Council hosts the draft design guidelines for it. The parish had 5,370 people at the 2011 Census, and the council's wider ambitions for the peninsula, with potential for thousands more homes, a new station and a new or upgraded road over twenty years, mean that what gets built here and how it parks is a live question. A wash that comes to the drive suits new estates with parking courts as well as it suits the old village.

What the marshes do to a car

Estuary air, lorry dust on the B2000 and the lanes

Cliffe stands on a low chalk escarpment looking out over the Thames marshes to Southend and, on a clear day, London. The marshes are part of the North Kent Marshes, protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and the air that comes off them is damp and salt tinged. It settles on paint as a fine film that dulls the finish and leaves glass smeary, especially after a windy week. The B2000 from Strood is a winding country road used by the lorries serving Mockbeggar Farm and the industrial jetties on the river, so anything that drives it collects dust and mud, and in autumn the lanes add leaf fall and farm mud to the mix.

The RSPB's Cliffe Pools reserve brings birds, and birds bring droppings, which etch a clear coat within days in warm weather. None of it is hard to deal with if it is washed off every few weeks. Your washer rinses before anything touches the paint, and a ceramic coating gives a newer car a hard layer that salt and droppings cannot grip.

Who lives here, and the clean that suits

Cliffe and Cliffe Woods fall in Medway's Peninsula ward, which the 2021 Census puts at 15,900 people in 6,400 households: 89 percent with at least one car or van, 52 percent with two or more, three quarters of homes owner occupied and fewer than one in ten a flat. It is car country by necessity, with one bus route and three miles of B road to the nearest town.

• Two cars on a Cliffe Woods drive: book both and your washer does them in one visit.
• A car that does the B2000 every day: a Deluxe Exterior brings back the paint, wheels and glass.
• The family car after a weekend on the marshes: Deluxe Inside & Out, with the mud vacuumed out of the footwells.
• A newer car facing the estuary: a ceramic coating is the long term answer to salt air.

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