Thousands of lives were lost over the long working life of Chatham dockyard, in the hundreds of ships built there that never came safely home to harbour. An art exhibition opening this week will celebrate the dockyard’s history.

It features a Tracey Emin neon piece spelling out the haunting words She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea, which shines out near the spectacularly illustrated book of poems written by a 19th-century sailor, John Tilling. In December 1864 he witnessed the destruction of HMS Bombay when it caught fire during target practice off the coast of Uruguay. He wrote desolately: “Ninety three of that brave crew sleep in the mighty deep.”



“I didn’t just want beautiful noble pictures of ships – and to me these both speak of all the lost souls at sea,” the exhibition curator, Jean Wainwright, said.

The exhibition includes encounters between famous names such as JMW Turner and John Constable, contemporary artists Catherine Yass, Langlands & Bell and Yinka Shonibare, and amateur artists, often sailors. A bird’s eye view of the Medway at Chatham, from the dockyard’s own collection, was painted in the 19th century by a Dr Turner, who must have had an attic view in the town, but about whom nothing else is known, not even his first name. He would probably be surprised to find his painting now hanging beside a spectacular work by his rather more famous namesake, JMW Turner, a study for The Fighting Temeraire, on loan from the Tate, in which the ship being towed to a breaker’s yard is just a ghostly grey mist over the river.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scale model of Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare. Photograph: Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)

A scale model of Shonibare’s ship in a bottle, Nelson’s flagship Victory which occupied the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010, has been placed beside another Turner, of the ship coming up the Thames carrying Nelson’s body after his death at Trafalgar.

The earliest image in the exhibition, a 17th-century view on loan from the British Library, shows the fortified dockyard with houses scattered outside the walls. The Kent town grew around it as the dockyard expanded in the 19th century, at its height employing 14,000 people.

“The same families had worked here for generations. When it finally closed in 1984 it tore the heart out of the town, and it left a legacy of bitterness,” said Alex Patterson, the visitor experience manager who has been working on the exhibition for a year. “This exhibition is about celebrating its history, the creativity it has inspired, and rebuilding those relationships with the town and the region.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail of JMW Turner’s Second Sketch for the Battle of Trafalgar. Photograph: Joseph Mallord William Turner/Tate/Tate Images

Admiral Sir Trevor Soar, now chair of the dockyard, said: “The closure was a political decision.” Soar commanded the last vessel built for the navy in 1966, the submarine Ocelot, which is now back in the dry dock where she was built as part of the museum collection.

The contemporary works include Yass’s lightbox views of the giant iron bridge piers in the heart of London, which once carried the railway line to Chatham. The artists follow the course of the river down to the muddy sandbanks and creeks of the Medway recorded in huge glowing photographs by Nadav Kander. There are six in the exhibition, although Wainwright only intended to borrow three – “couldn’t resist them when I saw them. I had to have more.”

Kander thinks there are now 30 in the series, which he is still working on. “I have to wait for the right weather, misty murky weather, that’s what I like,” he said. “The Medway is quite a boring river in many ways, but its history is extraordinary.”

