A 100-year-old Thames barge will return to the waters after more than a four-year restoration project.

The Raybel will be relaunched from Lloyd’s Wharf near Milton Creek, Sittingbourne, just a few hundred yards from where it was built and launched in 1920.

Raybel Charters, a group set up to complete the restoration in 2018, started the project in August 2019 when it installed a dry dock at the Wharf.

This became the barges’ home in November 2020 after she sailed from Heybridge Basin to Maylandsea, both in Essex before heading to Queenborough and then finally docking in Sittingbourne.

While the restoration took place the group also offered shipwright training, work experience and hands-on volunteering with the barge.

More than three years after it entered the dock it will return to the Thames Estuary on Saturday, May 11, although the work is still ongoing with the interior and rigging work still to be completed.

The organisers are inviting the public for a free celebration of the launch of the barge, from 11am until 3pm. Visitors will be able to book barge tours on the day.

The Raybel had first taken to the water on August 17 1920 at the Wills & Packham yard, Milton Creek and travelled up and down the Thames as well as venturing the North Sea and across the English Channel to Ostend in Belgium.

Commissioned by barge owners G.F. Sully, the boat’s name derived from the combination of Raymond and Isabel Sully who were born the same year.

Raybel was used by the family for summer holidays during the 1920s and 30s and is known to have been the pride of the fleet.

She was also a cargo transporter, part of a larger industry in the town which was based around the booming paper mills.

A restoration exhibition, which dives into the restoration timeline and major works completed up to now, will also be on display this weekend.

Vegan pizzas made with locally sourced ingredients which will be cooked on an outdoor cob pizza oven will also be on offer.

There will be coffee and French cakes provided by Jacques Et Lilie, a Faversham-based bakery.

During the open day, there will be two workshops as part of the more than £290,000 Llyods Wharf regeneration project.

The bird-hide design and build will talk visitors through bird sounds and silhouettes and their work will help to inspire the final design of the hide.

This is just one part of the makeover at the Wharf which is not finished but acts as a home not only for Raybell Charters but also for the Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum which is already on the site.

Youth group, Brogdale CIC, are also set to make use of the new attraction as it manages a newly completed skate park at the south end of the Wharf.

It aims to link three of the town's heritage sites, the dock, Sittingbourne Paper Mill and Sittingbourne & Kemsley Light Railway and become a new leisure and cultural project by “re-connecting” the town with its “lost waterside”.

The dock was originally built in the late 19th Century to service the two paper mills with raw materials being brought through the site and finished paper out of the site.

Included in the restoration plans, revealed in June 2020, are new workshops and a cafe in kiosks in reused structures such as houseboats or re-fitted containers.

A blacksmith’s forge that is located at Dolphin Yard will be relocated to the site which will be used as both a working museum exhibit and for boat-repair work.

Funding to complete the makeover came from Swale council, Kent County Council, the Transport Trust, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and a host of individual crowdfund supporters.