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Yes, Yikes Car Wash now covers Hempstead and Wigmore, the two suburbs on Medway's southern edge where Gillingham runs out and the North Downs begin. We clean cars where they are parked: on the drives along Hempstead Valley Drive and the closes off it, in the plots and avenues of Wigmore, and at the homes between Hoath Way and the M2. Book online, pick a two hour window, and a vetted local washer from the Yikes Network arrives with water, power and kit. Two cars on the drive? Book both.
Book your washKey facts
Parking reality
Hempstead was a hamlet of a few houses along Hempstead Road until the 20th century, and most of what stands here now was built in the early 1980s by Wards Construction and Wimpey Homes on old woodland and orchards between the Gillingham Link Road, the shopping centre, Capstone Road and Wigmore Business Park. Wigmore began earlier, as a 365 acre estate partitioned into smallholdings from 1906, and grew into the suburb it is today in the decades after. The result is a place built entirely around the car: drives, garages, closes and cul de sacs, with Hempstead Valley Drive running the length of the valley and housing on both sides.
There are no permit zones to worry about here. Medway Council sells resident permits only inside its controlled parking zones, which it shows on an address map, and none of them are in this corner. Your car is on your own drive, your washer pulls up alongside, and nothing has to move. Hempstead Valley Shopping Centre has more than 50 stores and over 2,000 free parking spaces for up to six hours, so even the shopping stays local.
Applications to build on the land west of Hempstead, around Capstone and towards Princes Park, have so far been held off, and the valley between Hempstead and Walderslade remains Capstone Farm Country Park, 114 hectares in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The green edge is why people move here, and it is also why the cars collect what they collect.
What the Downs do to a car
Hempstead and Wigmore sit on the dip slope of the North Downs, with South Wood, a Local Nature Reserve with dormice, in Hempstead itself, Darland Banks and its orchids on the Gillingham side, and the woods of Capstone on the other. Trees mean sap and honeydew in summer, leaf fall in autumn and bird droppings all year, and the chalk means a fine white dust whenever it is dry. The A278 Hoath Way runs down to M2 junction 4 on the suburb's eastern edge, so anything that commutes adds brake dust and motorway film.
None of it is a problem if the car is washed every few weeks; all of it is a problem if it sits for a season. Sap and droppings etch a clear coat, and chalk dust scratches when it is wiped off dry. Your washer rinses before anything touches the paint and photographs the car before and after, and a ceramic coating gives a newer car two years of protection against the lot.
How it works
Local life
Two suburbs with a shopping centre between them and a country park on the doorstep. These are the places that shape a week here.
The shopping centre at the top of the valley has more than 50 stores across about 480,000 square feet, with free parking for up to six hours, and it is where much of south Medway does its weekly shop.
The 114 hectare country park in the valley between Hempstead and Walderslade, in the Kent Downs AONB, was farmland until Medway Council opened it in 1984. The ruins of Upper Shawstead Farm are still inside it.
The 29 hectare Local Nature Reserve on the southern edge of Gillingham, owned by Medway Council and managed by Kent Wildlife Trust, has the largest population of man orchids in Britain, grazed by cattle all year.
A 6.6 hectare Local Nature Reserve in Hempstead, reached from Lamplighters Close, with a population of dormice.
Source: Wikipedia: South Wood
A memorial at Spekes Bottom marks where Flight Lieutenant Ian Muirhead DFC crashed in his Hurricane during the Battle of Britain in October 1940.
Source: Wikipedia: Hempstead, Kent
Arriva's 132 links Wigmore, Rainham and Chatham; St Matthew's church in Wigmore dates from 1925 and was rebuilt in the 1960s, and the Medway scene bands The Buff Medways and the Len Price 3 both wrote songs about the place.
Source: Wikipedia: Wigmore, Kent
Hempstead and Wigmore ward is the most car owning part of Medway in the 2021 Census: 8,100 people in 3,200 households, 92 percent of them with at least one car or van and 59 percent with two or more. Nine in ten homes are owner occupied, half are detached and fewer than 3 percent are flats. Medway as a whole runs at 81 percent of households with a car and 40 percent with two or more.
More on this: why bird droppings and sap damage paint and what a ceramic coating actually does.
See it in action
Yikes Car Wash live on GB News: washing cars through the hosepipe ban. The video loads from YouTube only when you press play.
See the latest washes. Before and afters, new areas and the team on the road, on our Instagram.
@yikescarwash on InstagramPopular in Hempstead
The fuller clean, inside and out, for the family car.
Two years of protection against sap, droppings and chalk dust.
The Super Valet: the deepest clean inside and out, for a car that has had a hard year.
What's on locally
Updated 25 October 2026
Hempstead questions
Next door
We check local details against council, TfL and other official sources before we publish them. Parking rules change, so always check the sign at your bay.
Pop in your ME7 or ME8 postcode, pick a window, and leave the rest to us.
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