Dover, Kent: guarding the narrow strait

Before the Romans: the Dour valley and the Bronze Age boat

The history of Dover begins with a river. The River Dour cuts a narrow valley through the chalk to the sea, and that break in the cliffs gave the first settlers shelter, fresh water and a beach to land on. Late Stone Age farmers are thought to have crossed to the valley by boat about 6,000 years ago.

The best evidence is a boat. In the early 1990s, workmen digging for the new A20 road to the Eastern Docks found the timbers of a sea-going vessel dated to about 1550 BC, built of oak planks lashed together with yew. The Bronze Age boat could cross the Channel with cargo, livestock and passengers, which means people were making the crossing more than three thousand years before anyone sold a ferry ticket.

Dubris, Dofras and the Norman castle

Julius Caesar's fleet arrived off Dover on 26 August 55 BC, found the cliffs lined with armed Britons and sailed on to land near Deal. Under Roman rule the river mouth became Dubris, a port town along the Dour with a lighthouse on each of the cliffs either side. The Classis Britannica, the Roman fleet in Britain, kept a fort here between about AD 130 and 208. Roman Dover still has one of those lighthouses standing in the castle grounds, and the Roman Painted House keeps its decorated plaster in the town below.

After Rome came settlers from across the North Sea. Dofras, as they called it, became one of the main places in the kingdom of Kent, and its people buried their dead on the hillside at Buckland. By the middle of the tenth century the Saxon town had its own mint.

In 1066 William the Conqueror marched straight from Hastings to Dover, and his men set fire to the defences on the hill. The Normans rebuilt them in stone. By about 1190 the great keep and inner walls of Dover Castle were complete, and in 1216 Hubert de Burgh held them against a French army under Prince Louis. Medieval writers called the castle the key of England. The town's later name, lock and key of the kingdom, grew out of that reputation.

Cinque Port, pilgrims and the Tudor harbour

From about 1050 Dover was one of the five head ports that supplied ships and men to the Crown in return for rights and privileges. Membership of the Cinque Ports made the town prosperous, and the Lord Warden of the confederation was also Constable of Dover Castle. Prosperity did not make it safe. A French raid in 1295 burned most of the town, and pilgrims heading for Becket's shrine at Canterbury needed lodging, which is why the Maison Dieu was founded in 1203.

The harbour was the harder problem. The Roman harbour silted up, a fall of chalk blocked the river mouth in the late thirteenth century, and shingle drifting along the coast choked every new haven that followed. Sir John Clark, Master of the Maison Dieu, built the first pier in 1495. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both paid for further work. A royal charter of 1606 set up the Dover Harbour Board. Much of the history of Dover harbour after that is the Board's long fight with the shingle.

Garrison, railway and seaside town

Fear of France turned Dover into a garrison town. Earthen batteries went up along the seafront and on the ridge facing the castle during the eighteenth century, and in 1804 work began on the brick and stone forts and deep ditches of the Western Heights.

Peace brought a different kind of traffic. The South Eastern Railway reached the town on 7 February 1844, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway followed in 1861, and both companies ran boat trains out along the Admiralty Pier to meet the steamers. The railways in Dover made the port the main road to the Continent. Between 1801 and 1901 the population rose by 600 per cent. Crescents of houses were built on the shingle bank in front of the old town, with bathing machines, a promenade pier and large hotels for visitors. The town and places of Dover, Kent are still largely that Victorian town.

Two world wars on the front line

The Admiralty Harbour, which enclosed the whole bay, was finished in 1909, five years before the most testing period in Dover history. In the First World War the port was the base of the Dover Patrol, and on St George's Day 1918 Admiral Sir Roger Keyes sent the Zeebrugge Raid out from its quays. In November 1920 the body of the Unknown Warrior was landed at the Admiralty Pier on its way to Westminster Abbey.

The Second World War brought the fighting closer still. The first shell to hit the town destroyed the footbridge at Priory Station on 11 September 1940, and the last ones were still falling four years later: a shell in September 1944 finally closed the Hippodrome theatre. Shells and bombs killed 216 civilians and damaged more than 10,000 buildings. The White Cliffs of Dover became a national symbol in those years, partly because the town beneath them was so plainly in the line of fire.

Streets, churches and the old town

Away from the castle and the docks, Dover is a town of narrow streets squeezed into the valley floor. The Market Square has been the centre of town life since the Middle Ages: a market grew up there around St Martin's Fair, the Corporation built its Guildhall on the square in 1605, and in 1820 a mob destroyed the town gaol on its south side to free smugglers held inside. The square now holds Dover Museum, home of the Bronze Age boat.

A short walk up the main street stands the Maison Dieu, founded by Hubert de Burgh in 1203 as a hostel for pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury and later taken over as the town hall. The parish church of St Mary the Virgin is still in use, its tower and west end dating from the eleventh century and standing on the site of a Roman building.

Some streets are younger than they look. Snargate Street runs along a shingle bar where the sea once reached the foot of the cliff, and by 1370 enough had been built there for a gate to be made in the town wall. Brewing was one of the town's main trades: Leney's Phoenix Brewery in Dolphin Lane is first recorded in 1740, alongside the Diamond, Wellington, Bulwark Hill and Kingsford's Windmill breweries. The villages of Buckland, Charlton and River, absorbed as the town spread up the Dour valley, kept their own churches, mills and character. The Town and Places section follows them street by street.

People who passed through Dover

Because Dover is the shortest crossing to the Continent, a remarkable number of people in English history either arrived or left through it. Hubert de Burgh held the castle for King John in 1216 with only about 150 men when the French brought down part of the outer wall. Henry VIII stayed at the castle for a fortnight in June 1513 before sailing for Calais, and Elizabeth I arrived in July 1573 with a procession so long that its tail was still leaving Folkestone as its head came down the Western Heights. Charles II landed on the beach on 25 May 1660 to reclaim the throne.

Later visitors came to be first. Captain Matthew Webb dived from the Admiralty Pier on 24 August 1875 and reached Calais nearly 22 hours later, the first person to swim the Channel. On 25 July 1909 Louis Bleriot crash-landed his monoplane in Northfall Meadow behind the castle after the first flight across the Channel, and in June 1910 Charles Rolls flew from Dover to France and back without landing. Charles Dickens knew the town well, staying at the Lord Warden Hotel on his way abroad and spending three months at 10 Camden Crescent in 1852 while writing Bleak House.

The twentieth century added the admirals. Sir Roger Keyes commanded the Dover Patrol and planned the Zeebrugge Raid of 1918, and Sir Bertram Ramsay ran Operation Dynamo from the tunnels beneath the castle in 1940. Their stories, and photographs of ordinary Dover people at work and at play, are gathered in the People of Dover section.

The ferry port and Dover today

Post-war Dover, Kent lost a good deal that the war had spared, as planners cleared old streets for redevelopment and road traffic. The port grew instead. Roll-on, roll-off car ferries started from the Eastern Docks in 1953 and hovercraft crossed to France from 1968 until 2000. The Marine Station closed to trains in 1994, the year the Channel Tunnel opened, and reopened two years later as a cruise terminal.

Much of the older town can still be read on the ground: the castle and the Roman lighthouse on one hill, the Western Heights on the other, the Bronze Age boat in the museum and the Victorian crescents on the seafront. The people of Dover range from Hubert de Burgh to Captain Webb. For a single narrative there is the brief history of Dover. For the town as a visitor finds it now, the guide to things to do in Dover picks up where the history leaves off.