A man, a woman, and a boy with a shopping bag make their way across the train tracks, escorted by a Network Rail worker in orange hi-vis. The air is still. It is midnight on Valentine’s Day, and this is the only way home.
Any moment now, engineers will begin tearing up the level crossing, replacing it before dawn on Monday. The catch is this: the work will close the only road in and out of the tiny village of Grain. For the next 29 hours, the place will be sealed off.
I climb into the waiting minibus with the group of midnight returners. It drives us through a two-mile stretch of industry and fields, like a demilitarised zone separating Grain from the rest of Kent’s Hoo Peninsula. The journey feels full of imagined drama, the last family to dart into West Berlin before the barbed wire was laid out.
Dave Slucock, one of the trio, is more prosaic: “I’ve been down the club, got pissed, and watched a Chas & Dave tribute band.”
Accounts differ about the last time the Isle of Grain was cut off. Some villagers mention 1953. Others talk of 1987, when a snowstorm cut off the town for 12 days. The Sun flew in with a helicopter to get the story. When a woman went into labour, the village policeman commandeered the chopper so she could get to hospital.
This weekend’s shutdown, then, is a once-in-a-generation event. Grain is often described as Kent’s most remote village, and regularly appears on lists of the country’s most isolated settlements. It is the edge of England, Sheerness to one side and Southend on the other, the Thames and Medway rivers mingling as they meet the sea. There is one pub, a chip shop, a Co-op, an off-licence, a church, a library, a village hall, a guest house, and an alpaca farm. Nobody I speak to knows why it’s called Grain.
What happens on the Isle of Grain affects more than its 1,700 residents. Grain LNG, the liquid natural gas (LNG) import terminal between the level crossing and the village, is Europe’s largest, with the capacity to process 20% of the UK’s demand. Nearby are a former BP refinery handling jet fuel, the London Thamesport cargo port, and soon the first direct power link between Germany and Great Britain. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Grain LNG has been described as a "strategic asset” and “critical infrastructure”.
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