The security guard looks as though he is crying as the rain runs down his glasses but his voice is steady and warm.

We are behind Lord Warden House, a shabby ghost of old England, white as a whale in the darkness, haunting Dover’s Western Docks. Once a grand hotel, a favorite of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Napoleon III, its shell now hosts the offices of freight firms. Visitors come for its parking spaces and the tents on the quay behind it. This is Tug Haven, where the people from the small boats are escorted off their rescue vessels. On the ramp up to the processing tents is where the photographers catch them. Thousands of people from across the sea, anonymous figures with their dark hair and orange life jackets, some wrapped in blankets, some carrying children, some children themselves, begin their new lives here. 

A journalist heads to Dover to gauge local reactions to an influx of migrant dinghies – and discovers that the headlines get it all wrong.