Plans for Dover's Bench Street - as well as more details about the Banksy mural - were revealed at a public consultation for the Beacon project
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00:00 It's a creative centre for East Kent College, a business hub and a creative centre with
00:06 an art gallery and studio workspace.
00:08 Well we're hoping mainly that this is going to raise aspirations for people in Dover,
00:12 bring more creative people in here and keep them in the Dover district so it's for the
00:16 whole of the Dover district but to bring more creative people into Dover and to encourage
00:21 future young generations to engage with creative arts and then make it their business.
00:28 Having seen it from afar, getting to this stage, it's incredibly exciting to see what
00:32 this can do for Dover and they've done a phenomenal job on the designs and having driven past
00:38 that almost on a daily basis, seeing the derelict area and that's almost the shop front to Dover,
00:43 it's incredible to see what the building will actually represent for Dover and calling the
00:47 project the beacon, it's the beacon of hope, the beacon of Dover.
00:50 I think it's very important to the council but more importantly it's very important to
00:54 the people of Dover and the district because this needs to be an iconic building, this
00:59 needs to deliver for the district, not just Dover and everything that we're seeing at
01:04 the moment is it's all moving in the right direction.
01:06 Well the Banks of New is not even on the same side of the road as the beacon, so that was
01:10 on the opposite side of the road, so that hasn't come down as a result of this, that's
01:13 come down as a result of the whole development and we're working with the company to identify
01:19 what can or can't be done with the bits that they've taken away because quite honestly
01:23 at the moment there was more than one organisation that was interested, when we said that's fine
01:29 but what we're not going to do as a council is incur costs which could run into quite
01:34 easily hundreds of thousands if not well over a million pounds for it and asked for a bond
01:39 that company walked away, the present construction company said well we'll look at certain bits
01:43 but not the whole thing can be saved anyway, it was a very old building so we're not sure...
01:47 Not the whole thing can be saved?
01:49 We were told very early on that in essence what you could possibly save would be the
01:55 yellow stars and the actual stents of the man on the step ladder, some of which had
01:59 already been, I understand, stolen or destroyed, but the blue was not able to be saved as we
02:05 were told by the experts at the time.