The post you are reporting:
Just back from another depressing perambulation of the town centre.
Just a sample of today's issues. A lamentable lack of any kind of pavement-style cafe/bar facility in the town's hub since the closure of the post-Ellie incarnations and Dickens Corner. So an intelligent conversation that was available even last year in a sunshine-lit piazza, when the weather finally relents for the literally three-months annual window (at best) that our terribe climate allows, is no longer an option, as my interlocutor has had enough of the noise and decline and moved to Deal.
A busload of cruise passengers pile into Illy cafe, so at least someone is getting the business.
Talking of Deal, I find the picture-framing service in Tower Hamlets has gone bust and will have to go to Deal to find one, thus putting money I would have spent in Dover into another town's coffers. I feel mildly cheered by the sight of shops preparing to open at St James before I reflect that they will just leave even more holes in the High Street.
I don't bother with the seafront as the piledriving is cranking up again. Head for vagrant-blighted Pencester Gardens, where some of Dover's numerous socio-eco0nomic casualties flock, dominating the space, in un-easy co-existence with a few tourists.
I really thought that DTIZ would lead to a better town. we have at least finally eliminated an aching urban wasteland and what appeared to be Western Europe's last bomb crater, a jungle-type of affair where allegedly illegals went feral.
The space 9St James) is attractive enough and we have a shiny new cinema, but what else? A Next and a Nando's if that's your thing, a decent and sunny Costa, and a few shops we already had, mostly unprepossessing chains. The overall effect of the various openings and closures is to leave the town feeling even more desolate, corporate, joyless and alienating.
I hear Burger Bros might have stayed but DDC refused planning permission to have chairs and tables in the courtyard outside.
A similar post a while ago mysteriously disappeared. I expect this will also go but sorry I am just calling it as I see it. If it breaches forum Ts and Cs, kindly let me know how.
