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Yes, Yikes Car Wash now covers St Mary's Island and Chatham Maritime, the newest neighbourhood in Medway and the one with the most allocated bays per square mile. We clean cars where they are parked: in the bays and courts of the island's closes, under the apartment blocks along the basins, and around the marina, Dockside and the universities. Book online, pick a two hour window, and a vetted local washer from the Yikes Network arrives with water, power and kit. The car does not leave its bay.
Book your washKey facts
Parking reality
St Mary's Island was marsh, then a prison, then the heart of the Victorian dockyard, and since the Navy left in 1984 it has become several hundred new homes with a primary school, a church, a community centre, a surgery and a late night pharmacy. Almost every home comes with an allocated space: a bay in a court behind the houses, or a numbered space under one of the apartment blocks on the basins, with estate costs covered by a service charge rather than council permits. Visitors to the Chatham Maritime side can use the Dockside outlet car park for up to four hours, subject to the site's terms, and the centre has issued tickets to people who arrived before it opened at 9am.
All of which makes this a place where driving out to a car wash makes little sense. Your car is in its bay, the bay is yours, and your washer brings everything needed to clean it there. If the space is under a block or behind a barrier, add the access details in the notes when you book so they can reach it. A boardwalk links the island to Dockside in about twelve minutes on foot, so you can leave the washer to it and go for a coffee.
Peel's redevelopment of the port, Chatham Waters, has outline approval for up to 950 homes alongside later living, commercial, retail and leisure uses. More bays, more courts and, while it is being built, more dust on the cars already parked here.
What the river does to a car
The island is cut off from mainland Chatham by the three dockyard basins, and the river wraps round the rest of it. A car parked here lives in damp, salt tinged air with nothing to break the wind off the estuary, and the gulls and waterbirds of the basins leave their mark. Salt film dulls a clear coat and smears glass; droppings etch paint within days in warm weather. Add site dust from the building still going on around the basins and the old port, and a car that is never washed goes grey quickly.
A regular outside wash every few weeks takes it all off before it marks. Your washer rinses before anything touches the paint and photographs the car before and after, so you can see the difference from your flat. For a newer car, a ceramic coating puts a hard layer between the paint and the river, and it is the single best thing you can do for a car that lives on the island.
How it works
Local life
A dockyard island turned neighbourhood, with the Historic Dockyard, the marina and the universities on its doorstep. These are the places that shape a week here.
John Rennie the Younger's 1862 remodelling of the dockyard built the three huge basins along St Mary's Creek, linked by passages, to shorten the passage from Sheerness. They still separate the island from Chatham and give the apartment blocks their water views.
Next door, 84 acres of the old yard survive as the most complete dockyard of the Age of Sail in the world, with HMS Gannet, HMS Cavalier and the submarine HMS Ocelot. Its calendar runs from Armed Forces Day in June, free but ticketed, to Steam on the Square over the August bank holiday.
St Mary's Prison stood on the island from 1856 to 1898 with around 1,700 prisoners, and in the Napoleonic Wars the island was the burial ground for French prisoners who died on the hulks moored in the Medway.
In 1585 a chain was secured on the island and linked to a wheelhouse at Upnor Castle, to be raised across the river in times of danger. Gillingham Fort, with 54 guns, later guarded the mouth of the creek.
The Dockside outlet centre, the marina and the Universities at Medway campus share the Chatham Maritime side with the Ship and Trades pub, twelve minutes from the island by the boardwalk.
Source: Contracts Finder: visitor parking note for Pembroke Court, Chatham Maritime
The island's basins host the annual Chatham Maritime Food and Drink Festival and dragon boat racing, watched from the quaysides.
Source: Local Authority News: St Mary's Island is done. What's it like to live there?
St Mary's Island sits in Medway's River ward, which the 2021 Census puts at 12,300 people in 5,300 households. It is the most flat heavy part of Medway by a distance: 58 percent of homes are flats, against 17 percent across Medway, and 41 percent are owner occupied. Seven in ten households have a car, and a quarter have two or more.
More on this: what a ceramic coating actually does and why bird droppings and sap damage paint.
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 St Mary's Island
The fuller clean, inside and out, for the family car.
Two years of protection against estuary air and droppings.
The End of Lease clean, inside and out, for handing a car back.
What's on locally
Updated 25 October 2026
St Mary's Island 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 ME4 postcode, pick a window, and leave the rest to us.
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