What happened
The Salutation stood at 5 Biggin Street in Dover and is one of the pubs put forward as the oldest in Kent, on a tradition that takes it back to the twelfth century. What the record carries is later and firmer. The Dover Kent Archives date the name on that site to 1791, and in January 1794 the Kentish Chronicle reported the death of Mr Bowles, landlord of the Salutation public house in Biggin Street, a man so attached to copper that he left behind £340 in good half pence and two five-gallon casks of bad ones. Through the nineteenth century the borough coroner held inquests in its rooms, which is how a pub of that size usually enters the record at all. It closed on 5 August 1963, when a local paper wrote that a two-storey lock-up shop would stand on a site the inn had occupied for more than three hundred years, and it came down so the pavement could be widened. A new Salutation was built sixty feet down the street at number 9. It never took, and after nineteen years it closed for good on 6 December 1983.
What is there now
The 1963 replacement at 9 Biggin Street still stands and, according to the Dover Kent Archives, is now a building society office. Nothing marks the original site a few doors up, which was cleared for the pavement in 1963 and rebuilt as shops.
Sources
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