The opening date for a huge new waterfront motel has finally been revealed, years after it was granted planning permission.
The eye-catching 90-bed hotel is planned for Dover seafront and is part of the ongoing £250 million Dover Western Docks Revival.
The ambitious project has also included improvements to Clock Tower Square and the creation of the new Marina Curve.
Plans for the new motel, which were submitted alongside a proposal for a restaurant, bar and swimming pool, were first approved in 2021.
The original scheme was for a hotel made from five blocks of shipping containers.
Civic group the Dover Society described the look as more suited to a fully commercial port like Rotterdam, rather than the heritage site and tourist magnet that Dover is.
It also said the planned rooms were too cramped.
Councillors at Dover District Council initially said they too were disappointed with the design and voted to defer a decision on the scheme for the look to be amended.
A revised application came back to the committee in December 2021, when it was finally voted though and the blocks were reduced to three.
The amended plans revealed no shipping containers would be used and the rooms would be bigger.
However, in 2023, the plans were once again revised and this time given a major overhaul following concerns about its appearance.
The colours for the third set of designs were toned down, and the bright colours removed for a more muted palette.
The application was approved in April of that year, but work has yet to start.
Now, Doug Bannister, boss of the Port of Dover, has revealed customers could be sleeping in the new accommodation from next year.
He told KentOnline: “Our aim would be that we can start work on the hotel in early 2026.
“It would take about a year, so hopefully by the end of 2026 or into early 2027, we’d be able to start seeing it operational.
“The principal aim is to construct a hotel that creates a bit more vibrancy out on the Marina Curve. But it is also to provides accommodation for people who may be traveling down for the ferries or embarking on cruises.”
Increased costs are to blame for delays in construction.
Mr Bannister explained: “Since that planning permission was granted, the market for investing into hotels became a lot tighter.
“And in particular, we went through a period of very high inflation for construction activities, both for the labour and the materials for it.
“So we’ve had to rethink how we’re going to deliver the project and come up with different models of funding that might be able to create an investable hotel.
“We think we’re getting pretty close now, but we still haven’t finished signing off on all the paperwork.”
Mr Bannister stressed that the start of construction this coming winter depends on having a workable funding package and signing off all the agreements with various partners in the project.
“We’re working really hard on it but until we get all that signed off, we couldn’t say for certain,” he added.
The applicant behind the project is Electric Motel Company, based in Brighton, and the scheme is expected to create 60 new jobs in Dover.
It comes as more changes are proposed for Dover, with the introduction of the new digital border checks for cross-Channel passengers.
The long-awaited Entry/Exit System (EES) – which will use fingerprint technology and facial recognition to check and register Britons and other non-EU nationals travelling to the Schengen area in Europe – has already been delayed several times.
Now, Mr Bannister has revealed the new system will be phased in over nearly five months from November 1, rather than started all at once.
He said: “The original programme was a big bang but it will progress, with a requirement for the Port to register 10% of vehicles in November and 100% by March.
“One of the things that the European Union did when they paused the introduction of this last year is they modified the regulations to allow a more progressive implementation.
“The more people that we can get registered on the system before we hit the very busy periods of, say, Easter or summer in 2026, the more people that get registered, the easier it will be following that.”
The Schengen area is the group of countries on mainland Europe, including France, where its citizens can travel between without border controls.
The method is that manual passport stamps at Kent ports are to be replaced by biometric facial imaging and fingerprinting.
The system was meant to begin last October but Germany, France and the Netherlands said their systems were not ready.
It has been feared that the mass of vehicles kept waiting for the new checks could cause delays as long as14 hours on port-bound roads.
Because of this land has been reclaimed at the Western Docks to keep them there during the checks instead of building up in queues on the roads.
Work on this, at Granville Dock, began last autumn and is continuing.
