Broadstairs history: the broad stairs, Bleak House and a town of seven bays

Before there was a seaside town there was St Peter's, the older village on the high ground inland, gathered around its parish church. Broadstairs began as its fishing hamlet on the shore. The early name was Bradstow, and the town council traces the later one to the broad stairs cut into the chalk cliff, a flight of steps that climbed from the sands to a medieval shrine of St Mary on the cliff top. In the Middle Ages St Peter's was attached to Dover as a limb of the Cinque Ports, the group of Channel harbours that owed ships to the Crown in return for their privileges.

The oldest structure most visitors walk under is the York Gate on Harbour Street. Inscribed stones give 1540 as the year it was built and 1795 as the year of a repair, and the pointed arch still has the grooves where a portcullis once dropped. The town council credits the gate to the Culmer family, and it could be closed against raiders landing from the sea.

The council's history records that Flemish refugees founded Reading Street in the 1600s, and its gabled cottages still show the influence. Kingsgate takes its name from the landing of Charles II in 1683. When Daniel Defoe passed through in 1723 he counted around 300 people, 27 of them in the fishing trade, and described the coast as a hotbed of smuggling.

Smuggling was a major industry along this coast through much of the eighteenth century, and Broadstairs had its own celebrity in Joss Snelling. In 1769 revenue men, acting on a tip-off, clashed with Snelling and his gang at Botany Bay, a fight remembered locally as the Battle of Botany Bay. Snelling survived it by a long way: he was fined for smuggling in 1830, at the age of 89, lived to 96, and was introduced to the young Princess Victoria as the famous smuggler. Whether Joss Bay was named after him or he after the bay is still argued over.

At the same time the cliffs were attracting a different kind of resident. In the 1760s Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland, built a seaside house at Kingsgate and scattered follies across the estate. Kingsgate Castle began as its stable block, later became the home of Lord Avebury, was a fashionable hotel in the 1920s and was divided into 32 flats in 1954. Stone House followed in 1764 and Pierremont Hall in 1785.

The wars with France left their own marks. Fort House, on the cliff above the harbour, was built as the home of the fort captain during the Napoleonic Wars. In June 1815 Major Henry Percy, carrying the Duke of Wellington's despatch from Waterloo and captured French eagles, was crossing the Channel on HMS Peruvian when the wind dropped. He and his companions rowed the last stretch and came ashore at Broadstairs, then took a post-chaise to London, arriving on 21 June with the news of victory. In 2015 more than a thousand people watched actors re-enact the landing on its two hundredth anniversary.

Pierremont Hall was designed by Samuel Pepys Cockerell as a marine villa for Thomas Forsyth. In the late 1820s and the 1830s the Duchess of Kent brought the young Princess Victoria there for summer holidays. The council bought the hall in 1927, and it is now used for events, weddings among them.

The population doubled in the fifty years to the 1850s, reaching about 3,000. The council's history dates the real start of the holiday trade to the arrival of the professional classes in that decade. One local man helped to shape the age of steam: Thomas Russell Crampton, born in Broadstairs on 6 August 1816, became a railway engineer. In 1859 he set up the Broadstairs Water Company, and its flint water tower is now the Crampton Tower Museum.

The railway itself reached Broadstairs on 5 October 1863, when the Kent Coast Railway opened its extension along the Thanet coast, worked from the start by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

Charles Dickens first came to Broadstairs in 1837 and returned summer after summer with his family. In the autumn of 1849, staying at the Albion Hotel, he was writing the early chapters of David Copperfield, and he told the illustrator John Leech that the air was "so brisk and bracing as it is nowhere but at Broadstairs".

One of his favourite lodgings was Fort House on the cliff. There he worked on David Copperfield, and in 1851 he wrote "Our English Watering-Place", an affectionate portrait of the town published in his magazine Household Words on 2 August 1851. Early in the twentieth century Fort House was renamed Bleak House, and a claim grew up that it was the house of his 1853 novel. The listing record notes that the novel's Bleak House is fictitious, but the name stuck, and the building is Grade II listed for its Dickens associations.

In a cottage on the cliff top lived Mary Pearson Strong, the woman on whom Dickens based much of Betsey Trotwood, the formidable aunt in David Copperfield. Her house is now the Dickens House Museum, run by the district council and opened on 16 June 1973 by the novelist's great-grandson, Peter Dickens. The Broadstairs Dickens Festival, first held in 1937, still fills the town every June.

At the end of the nineteenth century the town's reputation for fresh sea air brought a wave of convalescent homes for children, many of which lasted into the 1950s. By 1910 more than 10,000 people lived in Broadstairs and St Peter's. The North Foreland Golf Club was founded at Kingsgate in 1903.

In 1915 the novelist John Buchan was recovering from illness at St Cuby, a nursing home on Cliff Promenade. A private stairway cut through the cliff led down to the beach, and his daughter counted the steps. There were 78, and Buchan halved the number for the title of The Thirty-Nine Steps, published that October. Sir Edward Heath, Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, was born at Albion Road in St Peter's on 9 July 1916 and grew up in the town.

On 28 July 1949 the Hugin, a replica Viking longship built in Denmark and brought across the North Sea by a crew of 53 Danes, landed on the main beach. It was a gift from the Danish government to mark the 1,500th anniversary of the arrival of Hengist and Horsa in Thanet. The beach, once plain Main Bay, now carries the name Viking Bay.

Broadstairs Folk Week began in 1965. Its founder, Jack Hamilton, had helped to build up the folk festival at Sidmouth and wanted one in the south-east; the first shows ran twice a day in Pierremont Park, with his caravan as the festival office. Concerts spread into the pubs and the Retort House, a marquee arrived in 2001, and apart from 2020, when the pandemic stopped it, the festival has run every August. In 2025 it celebrated its sixtieth year.

Out on the headland, the North Foreland lighthouse has guided ships since a light was first shown there in 1499. The present tower dates from 1691, two storeys were added in 1793, and Trinity House bought it in 1832. In 1998 it became the last Trinity House lighthouse to be automated, in a ceremony led by the Duke of Edinburgh.

The town council's history notes that, unlike many resorts, Broadstairs came through the decline of the British seaside holiday that began in the 1960s and 1970s. Its seven bays, from Botany Bay in the north to Dumpton Gap in the south, stretch over about four and a half miles, and the walk between them is part of the King Charles III England Coast Path.