Upnor - Lower Upnor

Lower Upnor

Lower Upnor faces Upnor Reach. It was a single row of houses, separated from the river by the roadway and the hard. Located here is the Arethusa training centre, run by the Shaftesbury Homes. In living memory the Arethusa was also the name of the training ship moored near the shore. The society had moored a training ship here for over 105 years. The first was the Chichester, but after then all the ships were called Arethusa. The last Arethusa was the Peking, one of the R.F Laeisz's Flying P-Liner four-masted barques, built in 1911, and acquired after 1918 as war reparations. She was sold in 1975 to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York. In recent times extra housing has been built behind this street, exploiting the land exposed by quarrying the steep hillside that leads to Hoo Common.

Lower Upnor is also the home of two yacht/sailing clubs. Medway Yacht Club, which was founded in 1880, purchased land in Lower Upnor in 1948, now comprising approximately 14 acres (57,000 m2). Upnor Sailing Club was formed in the 1960s and moved into its present Club House (formed from renovating three existing traditional riverfront cottages) in the 1980s.

The Royal School of Military Engineering maintains an equipment storage and training facility in Lower Upnor, which supports the Riverine Operations section in Upper Upnor and the main school across the river in Brompton.