In 1835 the site of the present hospital was selected for the new Dover Union Workhouse. Opened on 29 September 1836, the workhouse was constructed to the courtyard plan devised by Sir Francis Head and designed to accommodate 500 inmates. Infirmary blocks, a children’s block and a chapel were added in the nineteenth and twentieth century. These buildings still survive but the main building was reconstructed in the 1920s or 1930s.
At this time the road leading to the workhouse was known as Union Road. The name was changed to Coombe Valley Road in 1964.
The building was known as the Dover Union Workhouse Infirmary to 1930, it then became the Dover Institution up to 1943, and was then known as the County Hospital. In 1948 it became Buckland Hospital.
The hospital has been modified and extended in the decades since, culminating with the Physiotherapy building in the 1980s.
