The 3 towns of Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate
This delightful little town, ‘Breezy Broadstairs,’ as it was called in an 1897 booklet, has always been considered a very healthy and agreeable place to stay, with its fresh air and its perfect sandy main bay, topped by the intimate and almost unspoilt streets above.
It was originally called ‘Bradstowe’ (sometimes spelt ‘Bradstow’). St Mary’s Chapel, now housing the bulging must-visit Albion second-hand bookshop, is built on, or near, the site of a chantry chapel to ‘Our Lady of Bradstowe’. It was said that ships had to lower their topsails in salute as they passed this much venerated spot.
Charles Dickens went to Broadstairs frequently, staying at Bleak House, different and smaller in his day, and then called Fort House. Visit the Dickens House Museum in the little house on Victoria Parade to see where the lady lived on whom the novelist based Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield, and to find out more about what Dickens’s take on the town was.
At the top end of the High Street, Princess Victoria (later Queen) stayed at Pierremont Hall, with its pleasant public gardens and still rather leisured atmosphere. Further up this road again is a surprising and impressive flint structure, built as a water tower by Thomas Crampton, a Victorian railway engineer of note, who hailed from Broadstairs. Visit the Crampton Tower Museum for more information.
Going out of town in the other direction, towards the North Foreland Lighthouse, you can, if you look carefully, find the stairs which were the origin of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. Entertainers, theatre and TV folk seem a part of the town’s tradition too; ‘Uncle Mack’ was a famous ‘minstrel’ and singer on the sands, whose memorial you can see, and Oliver Postgate, creator of Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog, lived until very recently in Broadstairs.
Part of the social history of the town is reflected too, perhaps, in the excellent ice cream parlours there, illustrating the successful and happy (particularly for ice-cream eaters) integration of Italian settlers from the late Victorian period onwards.
Broadstairs, originally a mere hamlet, expanded very gradually, and the inland village closely associated with it, St Peter’s-in-Thanet, was initially a more populous and important site than Broadstairs, with a magnificent church dating back to Norman times. St Peter’s Village Tours give visitors excellent and entertaining vignettes of the past history of the village, which still has attractive buildings, including the Georgian Nuckell’s Almshouses and one or two delightfully picturesque flint buildings left over from the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens that were at one time a feature of St Peter’s. Walter Sickert, the artist, lived in the village in the 1930s, and so also, at one time, did Annette Mills, of Muffin the Mule fame.
Broadstairs and St Peter’s have charm, character, and individuality that all stems from their evolution, history, and buildings. Don’t miss!
Historical Sites within easy reach of Broadstairs:
- Dickens House Museum, Broadstairs
- Crampton Tower, Broadstairs
- St Peters Village Tour
- Shell Grotto, Margate
- Margate Town Museum
- Ramsgate Maritime museum
- Dover, Deal, Richborough and Walmer Castle
- Canterbury Cathedral