Fish Street

Fish Street runs behind Camber Quay, the innermost of Dover's quays, whose inner end lies in mud for four hours of every twelve. It is the one street in the town where the boats come in and sell without anything standing between them and the buyer: the Dover boats run straight up to the market and land among the stalls, and by first light the street smells of tar, wet rope and the night's catch.

The Dover boats are not the beach boats of the gaps along the coast. They are bigger, owned in sixty-fourths like the packets, and worked by hired crews rather than by brothers and cousins; the port reckons them a business where the gaps reckon theirs a living. The two trades rub shoulders at this market and in the burial clubs, and hardly anywhere besides, and each looks gently down on the other. Whoever has brought the fish in, it is the fish-wives at the stalls and not the crews who settle the morning's price, and a master who argues with them generally finds that his catch has grown older while he talked.

The street keeps its own house and its own kitchen. The Lugger, under Landlord Peter Holness, is where the boat crews drink and where the dealers who buy from them settle their bargains. A few doors along, Martha Goldfinch and her daughters fry and stew whatever came in that morning, and the town will tell any visitor that nowhere in Dover serves a fresher dinner.

Those who know the port say the right way to spend a day in it begins with coffee from the stall below Packet Lane and a glance at the chalked tides at the eastern quay head, then passes Old Crane Stairs and comes into Fish Street in time for the market and a breakfast at Goldfinch's, before the money-changers in Customs Row open their grilles.