‘It’s a rare beast’: abandoned 168-year-old gun tower off the Kent coast to go under the hammer

One kilometre off the wide, flat expanse of the Kent coast, where the mouths of the Thames and Medway rivers meet, stands a strange, lonely building, with a two-storey circular tower and adjoining concrete structure. It is accessible by a causeway at low tide, but at high tide it is surrounded by water. This is Grain Tower.

Built in the mid-19^th century —1855, according to one of the tower’s doors — Grain Tower is a former gun tower, designed to protect the Kent coast from the French navy. It didn’t go exactly to plan. Improvements to artillery technology at the time meant that the tower was almost obsolete as soon as it had been completed.