DOVER KENT ARCHIVES
PUB LIST   PUBLIC HOUSES Paul Skelton

 

 Dover Arms

 

White Cliffs Experience

Dover Arms

 

I can guarantee that no one has ever drunk a pint in this pub, or is indeed likely to.

The Dover Arms was set up inside the White Cliffs Experience as a typical Dover pub in the war years. It looked like a pub from the outside and inside, smelt like a pub and even sounded like a pub from that era, including the clinking of glasses and the playing of a piano. That is until the air-raid sirens called you to the shelters and onwards to the next part of the show.

The Dover Arms was one of the very few pub names that Dover never actually had, although the frontage could well have been taken from blueprints of another local pub. If anyone reading this can identify which pub it could have been taken from, please let me know. There are plenty of photographs on this site with which to compare.

Chris Grimes suggests the "Criterion."

 

From the Dover Express, 1 March 2001. By TERRY SUTTON.

So what is going on with our old wartime street?

Secret meeting held to discuss treasure.

MYSTERY surrounds the future of the mock wartime street which stands at the now defunct White Cliffs Experience.

The former attraction had been sold to Plymouth for its 'dome' for £10,000 but publicity about the sale has sparked fresh interest in keeping it in Dover.

Many of the other items which remained in the Experience are to be handed on to the museum next door.

One idea put forward is that the wartime street, along with its sirens and exploding bombs, should be moved to Ladywell where there are proposals to convert part of the former South Kent College into a community centre.

Last week the council's Labour-controlled cabinet went into secret session to hear a report from Roger Madge, the director of economic development, on The White Cliffs Experience Wartime Street.

After the meeting official lips were sealed about what the cabinet is recommending to the policy and services committee, meeting on March 6, about the street's future.

Finance director Richard Bowditch did admit that the cabinet had made "recommendations" (in the plural) to the policy committee.

Mr Bowditch said: "One of these recommendations will be that the original decision to sell to Plymouth should be implemented."

The other recommendation, or recommendations, remain a mystery but no doubt will cause controversy.

The White Cliff Experience shut its door for the last time recently after a decade dogged by bad publicity and poor attendance figures.

There are no concrete plans for the future of the buildings or the site.

 

 

Since writing the above, a real "Dover Arms" has come to light. Found only the one reference to it to date, in 1846, somewhere in Oxenden Street.

 

LICENSEE LIST

Never held a license to serve beer.

 

If anyone should have any further information, or indeed any pictures or photographs of the above licensed premises, please email:-
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