The Give 'Em Beans! Guide to... DOVER
'The countryside may be very scenic in Cumbria, but once you are in Barrow that all goes out of the window. We couldn't find the town centre, but we did find a bed and breakfast place for £10 each. When we did find the centre of town - Barrow is twice the size of Dover with some 60,000 inhabitants - it was just one street of small shops, with endless streets of terraced houses around it. The place was extremely run down, with many houses and shops boarded up. I'm told that it used to be much worse!' from Dover Athletic fanzine Tales from the River End issue 40 - April 1998 Oh, right. So that's what they think of us. Cowps knows where they were when they thought they were in the town centre; Millom, perhaps. They never found Portland Walk, the Town Hall, Furness Abbey or the beaches on Walney. So, if they thought they'd get away with that they've got another think coming! Dover is as far away from Barrow as you can get without falling off the edge of the country and ending up in France. It conjures up images of white cliffs, bluebirds and ferries. And when Barrow are playing there, all those images become a reality. The white cliffs and ferries are there at other times as well, but whilst the ferries look resplendent as they sail out of the harbour in their brightly coloured liveries, the cliffs are looking a little tarnished. A film of yellow pollution gives them a dirty, scruffy quality which they never had in Vera Lynn's day. If it wasn't for the harbour, you wouldn't invent a place like Dover. Looking inland, on the right a huge highway dives off the top of the cliffs from behind the ancient castle and circles down to the port on massive stilts, like a giant's toy car set. This is the A2 from London, the old main road into town. Behind the harbour in a long straggly line, a series of small shops, boarding houses, fish and chip places and cafeterias huddles under the steep cliffs for protection, facing apologetically out to sea, looking slightly afraid of what there might be on the other side of the channel. Another huge highway, the M20, sweeps down from the left. This is the new way in and at first glance, Dover really is a pitiful sight. I looked at the massive port complex, the huge roads and the single line of houses and shops and thought is that all there is? It wasn't. At a roundabout a road dives inland, away from the sea, into a hidden cleft in the cliffs, behind which a narrow valley opens out to reveal the real Dover. The town centre is in the bottom of the valley whilst houses radiate away from it, climbing the hills behind the white cliffs and plunging down into smaller valleys everywhere you look. It's quite picturesque from a distance. But up close it's real naff. The town centre is a single, narrow, one-way street of shops and tatty pubs. If these guys thought Barrow had little to recommend it, I wonder how often they take a good close look at their own home town. No major supermarkets or DIY stores. Where do they go to do any serious shopping? Folkestone, probably. Where the one way system joins up at the far end of the town, a small river appears, only to disappear again into a long tunnel right under the shops and tatty pubs. If this is the affluent South East, give me the North any day. The place improves as you leave the centre behind. The middle class residential streets beyond Priory station are a picture of genteel, tree-lined, bourgeois respectability. And as you climb up the side of the valley amongst the housing estate above the football ground, the view down the hill and across to the other side is quite dramatic, with houses riding the hilly terrain as far as the eye can see in one direction, and green fields rolling away in the other. Except they're not really green. The soil is thin, the grass is sparse and yellow, and every so often, some off-white outcrops of chalk poke through. In fact, the countryside view doesn't really qualify as a scenic landscape at all. It's more like a desolate, semi-barren tract of land which looks in desperate need of some decent cultivation. There are no trees to speak of, just a few small, tattered bushes doing their best tosurvive on what nutrients they can find in the chalky subsoil. All in all quite depressing, especially when you compare it to the landscape in Furness and the South Lakes. In fact, there just isn't any comparison. If Caesar, the Normans, Napoleon or Hitler had come ashore at this point, they wouldn't have gone any further; they'd have gone back to France quicker than you can say veni, vidi, vici. The football ground is a little miracle of geography all on its own. It must be the only decent piece of level ground in this part of Kent, allowing enough room for a sizeable area of rugby pitches as well as the ground. The land rises up to it, and continues rising behind it with a huge grass bank dwarfing the stand on one side. This bank affords a free, birds eye view of the game to anyone lucky enough to evade the continuously patrolling Dover stewards. The rest of the ground is compact with two sizeable stands behind either goal and modest terracing down half of the other touchline and a social club alongside the other half. The people of Dover seemed a bit standoffish as we've come to expect of Southerners, but they weren't hostile. They were certainly curious about us Northerners. The looks we got, you might have thought we'd been mistaken for aliens from the planet Zog. So if there wasn't a Dover, would you invent one? Since it is possible to catch the ferry from Folkestone or the Channel Tunnel from Cheriton, the answer is probably no. And if you lived there you'd need crampons and mountain boots to get into town and back. But it's better than South Elmsall. Just. Issue 037 - November 1998