MERSHAM, England – The fields around the quiet village of Mersham, just 20 miles from the white cliffs of Dover, are a vision of idyllic English countryside. Lush, green trees swing above rolling acres of golden wheat. The spire of a 13th-century church lies on the horizon.
But soon something far less charming could this pastoral vista mar: a 27-acre parking lot with hundreds – even thousands – of idling trucks. If Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union causes a great deal of chaos, a maximum of 2,000 raids on France could be held at any one time here in an asphalt Brexit purgatory.
Four years after Britain narrowly voted to leave the bloc, the implications of that decision have dawned on some of the people living in an area where support for Brexit was strong. The parking lot is often called the ‘Farage Garage’ – a reference to Nigel Farage, the nationalist politician who was one of the loudest voices for Brexit.
“The noise and pollution would be enormous, especially if this is a 24-hour facility,” said Liz Wright, an elected councilor in the local town of Ashford, on the last sunny morning view of the site. t was officially known as MOJO.
“This has happened so suddenly and without consultation,” added Ms Wright, a Green Party member who voted to leave the European Union in 2016 – including six of the 10 people here – but said she did not expected this to be the result.
Then Leave’s campaigns defeated opponents’ predictions of more bureaucracy and disruption of trade across the English Channel as’ project fears’. Now, in the south-eastern region which calls itself the “Garden of England”, that fear has taken on a very real form of asphalt.
Although it left the block on 31 January, Britain remained tied to Europe’s customs system by the end of the year, leaving cargo with minimal disruption to the continent. In preparation for what follows, governments are spending £ 705 million – more than $ 920 million – on upgrading customs and border infrastructure.
Brexit supporters have made confident statements that the new system will hardly slow down the flow of goods. But if it goes wrong, it could do serious damage to Britain’s economy and hair in life.
The site at Mersham is designed to control freight traffic arriving on ferries from France. But local politicians have been told that if changes to Brexit rule bring chaos to the Channel Ports, this could also become a temporary place to park trucks.
“People are worried about what might happen,” said Damian Green, the Conservative party’s lawmaker for Ashford and a former cabinet minister.
“The worst case scenario will be miserable, maybe a few months, but in the best case scenario, it should not be used at all as an emergency park for trucks,” he said.
Kent knows all about traffic jams around the canal gates. In 2015, when French ferry workers went on strike, a line of 4,600 trucks strutted 30 miles back onto one lane.
On that occasion, the gridlock is combined with a heat wave. Emergency teams handed out more than 18,000 bottles of water to stranded truck drivers because perishable cargo went poorly.
“Delays at the border could cause significant knock-on effects for the ‘just-in-time’ supply chain, potentially causing widespread economic disruption while also turning parts of Kent into a truck fleet,” said a recent report by the Institute for Government, a research organization, on what to expect in January.
Even before the government bought the MOJO site, it was widely expected that they would become a warehouse. That construction work did not come as a surprise to many people, but the nature of the project did it.
Those who think gridlock can be avoided include John Lang, who voted for Brexit and his mind has not changed. He described his house and the quiet garden near MOJO as a “little bit of paradise”, and was sure it would stay that way.
“It’s in everyone’s interest to make it work,” Mr Lang said.
Local people who want to stay in the European Union feel justified, even if they are not used to crawling on it.
“I just find it so sad that this is another little rural area that we have lost,” said Sheila Catt, an administrator in the health service. She also worries about air pollution.
The problem for Mersham lies in part in the geography of Dover, a short drive to the east, where one of the busiest ports in the world is crushed in a confined space bounded by the famous white cliffs behind it.
Today, as many as 10,000 trucks can pass through the port every day, with ferries running up and down in an endless stream of cargo, mostly to and from Calais in France.
With Britain operating under European common market rules, trucks normally leave the port of Dover in about eight minutes. Only a small number of cars are stopped.
That arrangement is scheduled to end on December 31, when Britain is expected to chart its own course. The risk of disruption is great – just adding two minutes to the time needed to process each truck, the Port of Dover has estimated, can produce a 17-mile backup.
Talks over a trade agreement after Brexit between Britain and the European Union are deadlock. But even if they close a deal that eliminates tariffs, more controls on products will be needed than at present, and there is simply no room to do them at Dover. That trucks will instead stop at places like Mersham.
The port’s chief executive officer, Doug Bannister, said the Dover-Calais ferry route was so economically important in Europe that any gridlock would likely be resolved quickly. If there is a disruption, Dover has systems in place to clear bottlenecks relatively quickly, he said, and Britain plans to phase out changes as a rule, allowing time to be adjusted.
But he acknowledged “something unknown out there”, including, critically, how French authorities would handle freight controls in Calais. Any gridlock on one side of the canal would spread rapidly to the other – if trucks could not roll ferries, the ferries could not load other cars for the return journey.
Britain’s new system for electronic customs declarations is still being developed, and surveys suggest that smaller exporters are ill-prepared for the new bureaucracy, and are preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic.
“I am very, very sure that there will be no disruption on January 1st in the first instance, because it is a bank party,” said Mr Bannister, “but January 2nd may be another question.”
On the MOJO site, Paul Bartlett, a representative of the Conservative Party on the Kent County Council, welcomed the construction of a customs facility, and the jobs it could bring, but opposed its use as a holding pin for delayed trucks. “One of the main frustrations is the lack of information,” he said.
But sitting in the garden of the Farriers Arms, a country pub in Mersham, Jo Gregory said the implications of Brexit were only beginning to sink.
“I do not think people thought so until recently,” said Ms Gregory, a sales assistant who did not vote in the 2016 referendum and still has no firm opinion on Brexit.
But she does not stay here to make up her mind.
So worried is she about the MOJO development that she moves home from one village, about four miles from the site to the other, Westwell, further away.
“It’s getting busier, it’s getting louder,” she said, “and it’s bad enough with the traffic we have at the moment.”
