What Lies Beneath Kent? 596 Historic Landfill Sites Mapped — Including 26 Special Waste Sites

Across Kent and Medway lie hundreds of places once used to dispose of waste — some dating back to an era before modern landfill regulation existed at all.

An analysis by The Shepway Vox Team of the Environment Agency’s Historic Landfill Sites dataset has identified **596 records within the present-day boundaries of Kent and Medway**. Of those, **521 fall within the Kent County Council area and 75 within Medway**.

The Environment Agency defines an historic landfill as a site where **no environmental permit is currently in force**. Its national dataset includes both former licensed sites and much older tips which pre-date the licensing system. The Agency warns that much of the information about older sites came from a national survey carried out in the early 1990s and may therefore be incomplete.

For our analysis, sites were assigned according to their mapped location rather than simply relying on the county written in decades-old address records. That matters because administrative boundaries and postal descriptions have changed. Kent County Council currently covers 12 districts, while Medway is a separate unitary authority.

Kent & Medway Historic Landfill Sites – Environment Agency Records – Google My Maps

Interactive map of 596 historic landfill records across the current Kent County Council and Medway Council areas, compiled from Environment Agency historic landfill data. Locations are shown using coordinates positioned within the recorded landfill site polygons. Records may include historic waste types, first and last recorded input dates, operators or licence holders, and information on special waste, liquid sludge, gas control and leachate control.

Map: 596 Environment Agency historic landfill records identified within Kent and Medway. Click any marker to see the site name, recorded waste types, dates and other information held in the source data. Colours show a primary waste category for mapping purposes; individual sites may have more than one waste type recorded.

The resulting map stretches across the county, from the Thames and Medway in the north to Romney Marsh in the south, and from the London fringe to the east Kent coast.

But the numbers need treating carefully.

The Environment Agency data records 517 of the 596 sites as having an inert-waste flag, while 140 have commercial waste recorded, 128 household waste and 85 industrial waste. Because more than one waste category can apply to a single site, those figures overlap and should not be added together.

Another 53 records carry a liquid or sludge flag.

Perhaps the most immediately eye-catching figure is that 26 Kent and Medway records are flagged for “special waste”.

That term has a particular legal history. Under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, regulations could apply additional controls to waste considered dangerous or particularly difficult to treat, keep or dispose of. The Special Waste Regulations 1996 subsequently defined certain controlled wastes displaying specified hazardous properties as “special waste”. It is therefore a historic regulatory term and should not automatically be read as meaning that every site presents a current hazard today.

Among the Kent and Medway records carrying that flag are locations associated with Isle of Grain, North Farm at High Brooms, Sturry Road, Oldridge Wood, Kingsnorth Power Station, Barn Street Farm, Wellcome Chemical at Dartford and Aylesford Sewage Works.

They deserve further investigation, but the existence of a site in the historic landfill dataset is not evidence by itself that the land is contaminated or dangerous.

The age of some records is striking.

At Carpenters Pit, Woodstock Road, in the Swale area, the Environment Agency data gives a first recorded waste input of 1900 and a final recorded input of 1991 — a span of 91 years.

Other early records include 2–8 Morley Road in Tonbridge and Dane Valley in Thanet, both with first inputs recorded in 1930; Temple Marsh in Rochester, dated from 1931; Lydd on Romney Marsh, from 1936**; and Shawstead in Rochester and Yorkletts near Whitstable, both from 1937.

Again, those are the dates held in the dataset, rather than proof that dumping began on precisely those dates.

And here the gaps in Britain’s historic waste records become almost as interesting as what has survived.

Of the 596 Kent and Medway records we analysed, 333 have no recorded first-input date, while 322 have no recorded last-input date.

The Environment Agency itself acknowledges that the quality and completeness of the information varies considerably depending upon the age of a site. Where attributes are incomplete, the information simply may not be available.

That same caution applies to pollution-control information.

Only 39 records carry a gas-control flag and just nine carry a leachate-control flag in the dataset we analysed.

That does not mean the other sites necessarily had no controls. A blank historic field means the information is not recorded in this dataset; it cannot safely be converted into a “No”.

This distinction is important because an interactive map can make old data appear much more precise than it really is.

Our map therefore does something deliberately simple. Each marker identifies a location contained within the Environment Agency’s mapped historic landfill polygon and allows readers to see the surviving information attached to that record. For display purposes, we have given each marker one principal colour category — with special waste taking priority, followed by liquid/sludge, industrial, household, commercial and inert waste — while retaining the other recorded waste categories in the underlying information.

The exercise has also revealed peculiarities within the source data itself.

Some historic addresses no longer correspond neatly with modern geography, while a handful appear inconsistent with the coordinates attached to them. Those records will require individual examination rather than being silently corrected.

That is why this map should be regarded as the starting point rather than the conclusion.

The next question is what occupies these former landfill locations today.

Cross-referencing the 596 records against modern housing, schools, planning applications, watercourses and flood-risk areas could identify sites deserving much closer scrutiny. The 26 records carrying a special-waste flag provide an obvious place to begin.

There is an important difference between finding that modern development overlaps an historic landfill boundary and demonstrating an environmental problem. Any such case would need to be checked against planning documents, contaminated-land records, Environment Agency information, site investigations and, where available, remediation work.

But for the first time, the geographical legacy can be explored in one place.

Almost 600 historic landfill records, some stretching back more than a century, now sit on a single map of Kent and Medway.

And in several places, the most interesting questions may be not what the surviving records tell us — but what they don’t.

Source: The Shepway Vox Team analysis of the Environment Agency Historic Landfill Sites dataset. Environment Agency data are historic records of known landfill locations and should not, without further evidence, be interpreted as proof of present-day contamination or environmental risk.

The Shepway Vox Team

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