A look inside Dover Town Hall amid £10m revamp

Transcript

00:00So it's the corridor of the Victorian prison and it's where the female prisoners would have been

00:06incarcerated. It could be quite minor crimes in Victorian times because it was very much

00:11as a deterrent. So we know that for stealing a loaf of bread, for stealing two silver spoons

00:19from a double hotel, you could be imprisoned. Sometimes as a teenager, transported for seven

00:26years hard labour in Australia. So that could be breaking rocks for 12 hours a day for seven years

00:32and if you were lucky enough to survive, you probably couldn't afford the fare back to Britain.

00:38Here's the staircase which was where prisoners that were held in the cells in the basement of

00:43the town hall were brought up and straight into before the beach at the magistrate's court. I've

00:49actually gone back in time in my career. I'm standing in a room which was very familiar to

00:55me in the late 1980s when I first started my career and that was the room of Dover Magistrate's Court

01:01when it existed here within Dover Town Hall until it was moved to Pancister Road in 1987.

01:07So we're hoping to open in April 2025 and it will be hopefully hosting a mixture of private events,

01:15ticketed events, we've got wrestling returning, there'll be weddings, you name it we're open for

01:23any and all events.