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Here is what the author Alan Sillitoe, famous for "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", had to say about the seafront and today's DTIZ in 1951. Sounds rather familiar and shows how long reconstruction takes to gestate. Taken from the superb little booklet "Kingdom's Key" by Christine Waterman, available from the Dover Museum shop.
'One would not think that the war had ended six years ago. These ruins look so established it's hard to imagine they were caused by war. Nearly all the hotels along the harbour front are empty and roofless, and behind their facades the extensive area of desolation is like the Cocteau Hades in the film "Orphee".
There is no movement, only decaying walls and shuttered houses divided by narrow streets. Gutters are overgrown with dandelions, weeds crawl up blackened walls, and jagged rips shatter the vision. Pools of rainwater are trapped in uneven pavements. The cemetery in the middle is a grotesque collection of stones slanting irregularly to the sky, and all that remains of the nearby church is a gothic archway and a few windows in unsafe walls, through which small clouds cross the sky, a mobility that makes the empty houses seem more ruinous than ever.
The tarmac road at the seafront is rutted with disused tramlines. The sea comes up over grey shingle and flings itself against the wall. Gulls rise and fall on ridges and vales of green water, or curve and scream over the smashed houses, flattening before the wind like the German Stukas which did most of the damage ten years before. Past the breakwater and a moored trawler, the silver band of the horizon glitters in the morning sun.'