Medway Heritage Centre

The Medway Heritage Centre, formerly the Church of St Mary the Virgin, is a building incorporating elements from 1884-87, with a tower added in 1897 and the nave completed in 1901-03. Designed by Sir AW Blomfield, it incorporates earlier fabric. The construction is of snecked rock-faced ragstone with limestone dressings and a tiled roof. It is built in the Early English Gothic Revival style.

The plan consists of a chancel with north and south chapels, an aisled nave, and a separate southwest tower. The east gable features angle buttresses and three stepped lancet windows, a string course, and a small oval light at the top; the two-bay sides have Y-tracery windows. The taller nave gable has paired clerestory lancets, while the aisles have two-light windows. The west gable has coped raking aisle roofs with round-arched Norman-style doorways with splayed reveals and zig-zag mouldings, and double doors with strap hinges. A curved single-storey apse with narrow lights, sill band and a half conical roof sits alongside a two-light central window with a cinquefoil and flanking single lights.

The three-stage tower exhibits diagonal buttresses, weathered plinth, string courses, and a crenellated parapet with corner pinnacles. A south-facing two-centre arched doorway has double doors, a sunken panel with a label mould and narrow flat-headed light, and a clock in a sunken panel. There is also a four-centre arched belfry louvred light with Perpendicular tracery. The south chancel chapel presents a coped gable with angle buttresses and a stepped three-light lancet.

The interior, which has not been inspected, contains matching three-bay sedilia and a two-bay piscina with black marble columns and a continuous hoodmould, along with a chancel screen featuring cusped ogee arches, cresting, a cross, a low wall, and a gate. Three Norman round arches are at the west end, the outer aisle arches being lower and showing decayed zig-zag mouldings. The nave features round piers with octagonal caps to chamfered arches with hoodmoulds, and a roof with arch-braced collar trusses and arch-braced purlins. Fittings include a 19th-century stone pulpit with marble columns, an octagonal font with cinquefoil panels and a timber spirelet cover, a triptych by Clayton and Bell with a canopy and an image of the Madonna, and a 1795 organ by Samuel Green. The east window is stained glass from 1891 by Kempe. Various wall memorials are present, including a 16th-century pair of kneeling figures.