Frindsbury sat on the Medway directly across from Chatham Dockyard, the Royal Navy's principal shipyard in the eighteenth century. The Crown's own yard at Chatham built the largest ships, but the Royal Navy needed more ships than Chatham alone could produce, particularly during the long wars with France from the 1740s onward. Private contractors took up the work, and Frindsbury, with its sloping foreshore, its quarries (which gave the place its names like Quarry House and Quarry Yard), and its proximity to the Royal Dockyard's expertise and skilled tradesmen, was a natural choice. Edward Greaves and Nicholson set up at Quarry House around 1745. By 1820, at least six 74-gun third-rate ships of the line had been built at Frindsbury yards, along with frigates, brigs, transports, sloops, and a stream of smaller vessels. Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the warship work stopped.

Of all the ships built in Frindsbury, the Bellerophon was the one history remembered. She entered service in 1790 under the command of Captain Pasley (a different Pasley from the one who founded the engineering school across the river), and at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 she went alongside L'Orient - a vast 120-gun French flagship - and pounded it until its powder magazine exploded with a blast so loud it was heard miles away. The L'Orient blew up; the Bellerophon survived. She fought at Trafalgar, was badly mauled in the action, and emerged. In July 1815, after Waterloo, Napoleon surrendered to her captain off Rochefort and was carried aboard for transport to England, before being transferred to the Northumberland for the voyage to St Helena. After her active service ended she was renamed Captivity and served as a prison hulk off Sheerness - a quietly cruel coda for a fighting ship - before being sold to breakers at Plymouth for 4,030 pounds and broken up in 1834. The American Imagist poet Amy Lowell wrote a poem about her construction, called The Hammers.

Josiah and Thomas Brindley took over the Quarry House lease and launched their first ship there in 1794. They expanded, built a new yard that became the entrance to the Thames and Medway Canal, then a third yard further downriver. Between 1807 and 1814 the Brindleys built another three 74-gun ships of the line - in 1807, 1810, and 1811 - plus a string of frigates, brigs, and transports for the Napoleonic Wars. John King of Upnor, working from a yard further downstream toward the village of Upnor, launched five 10-gun sloops in a single year - 1801 - and a 74-gun ship of the line in 1809. John Pelham added another 36-gun frigate and a 58-gun ship between 1807 and 1812. Wilson and Co launched smaller vessels in the 1790s. For a stretch of about thirty years, the Medway's west bank between Strood and Upnor produced more major British warships than almost anywhere else in England outside the Royal Dockyards themselves.

Why did it stop? The wars ended in 1815. The Royal Navy abruptly needed fewer ships of the line, and built what it did need at the Royal Dockyards. The private yards lost their main customer. From around 1820 the same yards turned to a different trade: Thames sailing barges. The Medway's banks were lined with brick kilns, cement works, and lime kilns - the industrial heart of the Victorian Thames Estuary - and they all needed flat-bottomed barges to haul their products down the Medway and round into the Thames to London. So the yard that had built the Bellerophon began turning out 40-ton flat-bottomed barges instead. John Curel took the Quarry Yard lease around 1820. His son George took over around 1870, expanded in 1887, and the Curels kept building barges into the early twentieth century. Other families - the Littles, the Gills, eventually the London and Rochester Barge Company - worked the other yards. Between 1870 and 1990, the Register of Shipping records just over a hundred Frindsbury-built barges.

The barge owners' lists give a quietly elegiac picture of the post-war Medway. The Phoenix Portland Cement Company commissioned barges called Hawk, Cerf, and Phoenix; the Formby Cement Company at Whitewall Creek bought Sara, Pink, Queen, Neptune, Whitewall, Vauxhall, Eclipse, Margaret Louise, and Ella Vicars; the Burham Brick, Lime and Cement Company ordered James, John, Ann, Varnes, The Gun, and William; Eastwoods the Medway brickmakers commissioned barges named after couples - George and Eliza in 1845, Frederick and Mary Ann in 1852, Ann and Frances in 1857, Arthur and Eliza in 1862. The barges carried cement that built Victorian London, brick that built the suburbs, lime that built the railways. They sailed under spritsails up the Thames on the tide and back down with cargoes of city ash to make more brick. They were the lorries of the river, and they were beautiful.

Frindsbury's shipbuilding history slowly contracted through the twentieth century. The cement and brick industries shrank. Lorries took over from barges. Most yards closed. By 2006 only one Frindsbury yard - the London and Rochester Barge Company's site on Canal Road, since become part of LRTC and Crescent Shipping - was still active, and it was operating as a ship-repair yard rather than a building yard. The ground where Bellerophon was launched is now part of the suburban edge of Strood. The slipway where John King of Upnor sent five sloops down the ways in a single year is gone. The brickworks and cement plants whose barges defined a century of river traffic are mostly memories. But the Medway still flows past, and on quiet evenings, with the tide coming in and the lights of the Chatham Historic Dockyard reflecting across the water from the opposite bank, it is not hard to imagine the sound that Amy Lowell's poem turned into verse - the hammers of Frindsbury, building the ship that would carry the man who lost Europe.