I've lived here for about 27 years, moved in 1995 or 1996 up in the old army quarters around Singlewell. The military were selling off some houses, my dad had just done his 23 years and my parents bought a place up there and we've lived here ever since. It was hard at first because we moved from Osnabruek in Germany to Gravesend so I didn't have any friends here and I hadn't gone to school here so actually where I started making my friends was at the pub. I had a period where I went off to University so I was living away from home for about four years and I started working in London so it took me a while to settle in again. I think the thing that helps you settle is when you make your own friends here and once I did that then I started hanging out all over the place. I’ve got a lot of positive memories which is why when I moved out of my parents house I didn't move away and I live in the town centre. I remember when they started talking about this chalk quarry that just had nothing in it. They started building this massive shopping centre but because we had Lakeside across the river, I wasn't really sure about another shopping centre at that time. It's a major hub for this area now as loads of people work there. People from all over the place now working for them and I know people come from that part of the world to Bluewater so I think that had a major impact. The Garden City is now being built and has parts of it already built and international high speed trains were a big deal, getting into Kent was massive and once I earned a bit more and had better paid job in London I started using the trains. Bluewater is one of my favourite places. I used to work there many moons ago. I was one of the cinema managers in the early 2000s. What was quite a fun part of the job was that you got to watch the new prints when they came in just to check that there were no kind of glitches on them, so getting to watch some of the new releases a couple days before they were due to be premiered was pretty cool. I did that job for a bit but I used to work in the theatre, so although it was good fun working in a cinema I did miss live theatre so I went back to that. My welcome message to new residents would be: Gravesend is an interesting and historic place and it is a place that has a community. Welcome, you are coming to a place with great history and great people with lots of interesting things to do. The best place to settle in is to dive in - make friends, go to a local pub, have a hobby locally, because then you meet people. Having friends and having things to do has helped me feel at home. It’s really hard to pin down when it started feeling like home, I think it was the moment where I just knew how to get to places, I knew where everything was, had a proper hairdresser and things I like to do, and I understood all the local shorthand, all the things that happened in a calendar year. I became a Gravesendian! I go to sewing class on a Monday evening in Strood and I love it. I love walking in Shorne Woods Country Park - one of my favourite places to hang out. I love walking around Gravesend town centre. It's a nice walkable space. I'm part of the GAS network, which is the Gravesend art salon network, and they meet on a monthly basis, and I get to hang out with artists and producers and people that work locally in the creative sector, because culture and arts is really important to me. It's what I do as my day job. I go to the St George's Art Centre, which is often where the meetings are. ---- From Ndini (This is me), a series of photographs and interviews with local residents by Mbeke Waseme, commissioned by Cement Fields for Ebbsfleet Citizen Archive. Mbeke Waseme is a writer and photographer based in Gravesend. websites.lightrocket.com/mbekewaseme
Submitted by Mbeke Waseme