The post you are reporting:
Dover Town Team regularly cleans the outside of the windows on all the unoccupied units and also the inside of those that The Team is allowed access to. Unfortunately, there are quite a few where absent landlords will not allow the team to have access to the inside and who refused permission to do work to make the outsides more cosmetically pleasing. The Team had hoped that the hold-outs could be persuaded to cooperate by involving larger, national, organisations, but the nationals appear to have fared no better than the Town Team, yet everyone who is trying to get the hold-outs to make improvements continues to try.
Cardboard and rubbish is frequently removed from doorways, often by Town Team members themselves, but is more often than not replaced by new cardboard within hours. Pressure to improve properties is continuous, it doesn't stop, it goes on day in and day out. The advent of the DTC Love Dover initiative will add to that daily pressure as that organisation springboards off the improved environment to sequentially acquire, refurbish and return to use empty properties within the High Street.
Many of the vacant units currently have unusable upper floors and absent owners seem to expect new retail tenants (if they ever get any) to make the improvements required to return upper floors to full functionality - this then proves to be a disincentive to potential new tenants who don't then take on the liability.
I don't know if anyone else on here has tried to get funding to do the 'easy stuff' in the High Street that should by rights be being done by owners, or tried getting access to buildings owned by large international property portfolios to carry out work without having obtained specific funding to do so - its not easy (I want to say something much stronger, but good manners and all that).
The full refurbishment of the area between Bench Street and Market Street is a start (its not the final destination), it is something that is possible to get funding for and is something that can make a difference to footfall that can, in turn, spark an actual interest from absent landlords in the state of their properties and which will help the Town Council's Love Dover initiative by vastly improving the approaches to our High Street to/from the upcoming DTIZ and the existing and potentially new routes to/from the seafront. The projection through the new water feature in the evenings is designed to extend the period each day when the area is in general use and help outlets there by having something attractive and interesting going on in this part of town for people to go to after work with their families. It is called 'Ghosts of Dover' because of the ethereal nature of images projected through moving water, not because the projections will be of ghosts, and because it will draw on our extensive historical archive to begin to tell Dover's own unique history over 3000 years.