'Roar of the hovercraft was a sound of our town - so much has changed'

The Hoverspeed craft would land on the beach Plage Bleriot in Calais, just a few minutes' walk from the city centre.

It seemed right that those of us in Dover could take such a short, simple hop to the Continent when we could physically see it from the White Cliffs.

For the same journey today as a foot passenger it's a total of three hours - having to check in at Dover's Eastern Docks with P&O Ferries 90 minutes before a 90-minute sailing.

Such is the change brought about by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel(for years nicknamed the Chunnel) 30 years ago this week.

Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterrand officially opened it on May 6, 1994, in a double ceremony at Calais and Folkestone.

The tunnel put a squeeze on parts of the cross-Channel industry so that the hovercraft, for one, could no longer survive and ended by 2000.

Back in 1987 BC when I moved to Dover, ferries would take you to Calais, Boulogne, Zeebrugge and Ostend and you could also sail to Boulogne from Folkestone.

The services were by Sealink and Townsend Thoresen, succeeded by P&O European Ferries.

There are no ferries left in Folkestone now and sailings from Dover are only to Calais and Dunkirk.

The Channel Tunnel snatched customers away.

"The hovercraft was a sound of Dover - a bit like the seagulls…"

The Eurostar passenger train service made it particularly attractive for London to Paris passengers, dashing them between the capitals in a couple of hours.

It was far better than the hours of grinding travel on two trains and a ferry. Aeroplane flights were considered too expensive in those days.

In some ways, the hovercraft wasn't missed. I remember often travelling on it in rough weather with the horrible sensation of my stomach rising and falling with the seasickness.

But the hovercraft was a sound of Dover - a bit like the seagulls.

On a still night, the roaring noise of one coming back to England could be heard as far as on the Clarendon and Westbury estate.

But the Channel Tunnel never completely squashed the ferry service. Today it remains buoyed by freight traffic.

But in the late Eighties, the tunnel was dreaded by many who feared it would cost thousands of jobs in Dover.

In August 1987, a report called the Kent Impact Study, sponsored by the Channel Tunnel Joint Consultative Committee, predicted a loss of 5,000 ferry and port posts in the Dover district.

That would push up local unemployment from 10% to 23%.

Dover District Council felt the only solution was to find alternative sources of employment, particularly through light industry and tourism.

To help save the area's bacon, it invested in a £14 million heritage centre in Market Square, constructing the building that is now Dover Discovery Centre.

The White Cliffs Experience portrayed the town's history through the centuries and was spearheaded by two cartoon-like characters, Sid Seagull and Corporal Crabbe.

The latter was a model of a crab that moved on wheels rather than legs. I visited the centre on a press tour in 1991, shortly before Princess Ann opened it that July.

I saw models of Ancient Britons and a quarter of the centre was dedicated to the Romans. Attractions included actors dressed as citizens and soldiers from the time and talking on video about their experiences in Dubris, the Roman name for the town.

The best and most authentic part was the recreation of a Dover street scene in 1944 when the town was dubbed Hellfire Corner - due to it suffering a high proportion of Nazi bombings.

However, it did not capture the public's imagination and was quickly dubbed the White Elephant Experience. A continual lossmaker, it finally closed in 1999.

I reported on the financial woes as early as 1995 with a story headlined: "The Losing Experience."

Sid Seagull was for the birds.

It was also the need to adapt to the Channel Tunnel that led to the creation of the present A20 at Dover and Folkestone, which opened in November 1993.

I christened it on its first weekend, driving (carefully) on the icy road surface through the Roundhill Tunnel in Folkestone.

The project was to help provide a level playing field between the Channel Tunnel and the ferry industry.

Until then, the A20 at Dover was the present B2011 Folkestone Road.

Some of the juggernauts coming from Dover Eastern Docks would use it to leave the town and there was the awkwardness of them having to get around parked cars on that relatively narrow road.

They would slowly trundle along, irritating car drivers by holding them up, especially climbing the hill at Maxton.

I would often be delayed on the way to work in Folkestone and would try to get ahead of them by going parallel along Old Dover Road at Capel-le-Ferne.

The houses in Folkestone Road were blackened by the diesel pollution of the trucks.

But it was the residents of Aycliffe that suffered even more.

Some of the estate's roads were realigned and the works caused both maddening noise and snowstorms of chalk dust that covered houses and cars.

Things came to a head in the summer of 1991 when the MP at the time, David Shaw, visited the scene and was told by a resident: "We want our lives back, we want our sanity back."

The Conservative said he would "bang heads together" in Whitehall.

One person who had the most to lose was an elderly bachelor called Ray Pigeon whose bungalow off Old Folkestone Road, Sunny Corner, was right in the way of the new route.

He had been born in that cottage and fought a heroic battle against the mandarins to save it from demolition.

He was a prolific letter writer to local newspapers and one said: "Speak up, Whitehall, we are agog to hear your excuses now."

But he became so ailing that he had to move to a nursing home in 1991.

When I turned up to witness the mayhem that summer I saw his cottage already being pulled down.

A councillor for the area told me: "Don't put that in the paper unless you really want to finish him off."

Ray Pidgeon died brokenhearted that November, aged 82.

The starter gun for the Channel Tunnel project had been fired at Canterbury Cathedral on February 12, 1986, when the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and M. Mitterand signed the Channel Tunnel Treaty.

Landmarks included the joining of the two ends of the tunnel on December 1, 1990, linking Britain and France by land for the first time since the Ice Age.

Another one of my colleagues was lucky enough to cover the meeting of British worker Graham Fagg and his French counterpart Philippe Cozette that day.

Digging for the tunnel had begun in December 1987 and the project led to an influx of construction workers from all over the country, similar to the migration of miners to the Kent Coalfield in the 1920s.

A village was specially created for them at Farthingloe, between Hougham and Dover.

One tabloid newspaper did a feature on the men and dubbed them the Tunnel Tigers. They were depicted as hard-drinking, womanising, brawling men, shaking up the nightlife in Dover and Folkestone and unnerving the locals.

"We're tough and we're mean," one was quoted as saying.

Many of them also rented rooms locally. Having a new house at the time and needing lodgers to help pay the mortgage, I inevitably ended up with one.

He was a Lancastrian called Henry Bamber, a draughtsman at the Shakespeare Cliff construction base.

He was at my home from January to May 1990 and didn't fit in with the tough guy stereotype. Instead, he proved to be a very amiable and popular character who made friends locally very quickly.

When the house phone rang it would often be for him.

The site where he worked was reclaimed and in July 1997, became the present Samphire Hoe nature reserve.

I had purchased the house in December 1988, for £48,000, and had been advised by colleagues to buy fast as the prices were "shooting up" because of the Channel Tunnel.

It appeared the project was creeping into every part of life in Dover and Folkestone.

Visit KentOnline tomorrow for the final part in our series - as we speak to those who have worked for Eurotunnel since the very first day.