Thanet as a Destination: Two Centuries of Seaside Visitors, and After

Thanet was one of the first places in England where people went to the sea for pleasure rather than for work, and it has been through the entire arc of the English seaside resort: invention, boom, mass popularity, collapse, dereliction, and a partial recovery on completely different terms.

Two hundred and fifty years of that history are legible in the buildings, which is why the towns look the way they do and why the housing stock creates the problems it does.

Sea bathing, and how it started

Sea water was prescribed as a medical treatment in the eighteenth century, to be drunk as well as bathed in, and the practice created the resort. Margate was among the earliest places to organise itself around it.

The bathing machine belongs to that period, and Margate has a strong claim on the modern form of it. A local Quaker, Benjamin Beale, is credited with adding the canvas hood that allowed a bather to enter the water unseen, some time around the middle of the century. It sounds trivial and it was commercially decisive: it made sea bathing acceptable for women, and therefore made it a family activity rather than a male one.

A sea-bathing infirmary was established at Margate in the 1790s to give poor patients the same treatment, which is a reminder that this was understood as medicine rather than as leisure.

Getting there before the railway

The first visitors came by sea. Hoys, small sailing vessels, worked between London and Margate, carrying passengers alongside cargo on a journey that depended entirely on wind and tide and could take a day or considerably longer.

Steam changed that from around 1815. A steamer could keep a timetable, and the London to Margate service became one of the busiest excursion routes in the country. It also changed who came: a reliable, affordable passage brought people who could not have committed three days to the journey.

That distinction between Margate and its neighbours begins here. Margate got the steamers and the crowds. Broadstairs and Ramsgate, less accessible and more expensive to reach, developed as quieter and more genteel resorts, and the difference in character has never entirely gone.

The railway, and the boom

The railway reached the isle in the middle of the nineteenth century and completed the transformation. A day trip from London became possible for an ordinary working family, and the volume of visitors rose to a scale the towns had to rebuild themselves around.

What went up in that period is most of what is standing now. Seafront terraces, hotels, boarding houses, assembly rooms, the piers and jetties. Margate’s jetty opened in the 1850s. Amusements followed, then the site that became Dreamland, which opened under that name in the 1920s on ground that had been a pleasure garden before it.

The economics were straightforward while they lasted. Large numbers of visitors, staying a week, returning annually, in a season that ran from Whitsun to September and paid for the rest of the year.

Dickens, Turner and the reputation

Two names attached themselves to the isle in this period and still do most of the cultural work.

Charles Dickens spent long periods at Broadstairs from the 1830s onwards, wrote there, and described the town in an essay as Our English Watering Place. The house on the cliff associated with him is the town’s best-known building, and the annual festival keeps the connection commercially alive.

J.M.W. Turner went to school in Margate as a boy and returned repeatedly as an adult. His remark about the skies over Thanet being the loveliest in Europe is quoted locally to the point of exhaustion and is nonetheless the reason the gallery on the harbour arm is where it is. The light over the estuary is a real phenomenon, produced by the low horizon and the reflective water, and painters have kept coming for it.

The collapse

The decline began in the 1960s and was effectively complete by the 1980s. The cause was the package holiday: a week in Spain, with guaranteed weather, at a price the English seaside could not undercut.

The speed of it is the part that matters for understanding the towns now. A resort economy is built almost entirely of specialised property. A hotel is not easily anything else, and neither is a boarding house or an amusement arcade. When the visitors stopped coming, the buildings remained and had no alternative use.

What they became was housing, of the cheapest kind. Hotels and boarding houses were subdivided into flats and bedsits, and a stock originally built for one week at a time was let by the room to people with no other options. In Cliftonville that transformation was extreme enough that it still defines the area’s housing problems, and the licensing schemes and planning restrictions now in place are a response to it.

The jetty at Margate went in the great storm of 1978 and was never rebuilt. Dreamland closed in stages and burnt in part. By 2000 the seafront was in poor condition and the towns had a national reputation they did not want.

The recovery, and what it is not

The revival since roughly 2010 is real and it is a different business from the one that collapsed.

Turner Contemporary opened in 2011, Dreamland reopened in 2015, and the independent shops, cafes and galleries of Margate Old Town grew alongside them. The high speed rail service made a day or a weekend from London straightforward.

The difference from the old model is fundamental. This is a short-stay, out-of-season, higher-spend visitor economy rather than a week-long summer one, and it supports different businesses. It does not refill boarding houses, because the boarding houses are flats.

It is also uneven. Margate has more of it than Ramsgate, the Old Town more than the estates behind, and the property price increases that came with it have fallen on households who were not the intended beneficiaries. The recovery is genuine and it is not general.

Broadstairs and Ramsgate, separately

The three towns did not decline equally and they have not recovered equally, and the difference is older than either.

Broadstairs kept a residential, quieter identity through the whole cycle. It had fewer large hotels to lose, its bays are small and enclosed rather than a single mass beach, and the folk week and the Dickens festival gave it an annual calendar that survived. Property there has been the most expensive on the isle for a long time.

Ramsgate’s trajectory was different again. Its asset was the harbour rather than the sands, and its Georgian and Regency architecture is the best on the isle. Royal patronage, from George IV’s shelter there to Victoria’s childhood visits, gave it a status that Margate’s crowds never had. What it lost was not primarily the holiday trade but the port: the cross-Channel services and the working harbour economy that outlasted the resort boom and then went in their turn.

The consequence is that the three towns need different things. Margate’s problem was its hotel stock, Ramsgate’s is its harbour, and Broadstairs’s is affordability. Regeneration policy that treats the isle as one place has repeatedly answered the wrong question in two of the three.

The hoteliers, and where they went

One economic detail is worth recording because it shaped local politics for decades.

The resort economy supported a large class of small proprietors: families who owned one hotel or boarding house, lived in it, and made a year’s income in a season. They were locally influential and well organised.

When the trade collapsed, that class did not simply lose money. It converted. A proprietor with a building and no visitors became a landlord with a building and tenants, frequently housing people placed there by authorities from outside the district. The transition happened building by building over roughly twenty years, and it changed what the local economy was and who held property in it.

Understanding that helps explain why housing, licensing and out-of-area placements are as politically charged on the isle as they are. They are not separate issues from the seaside history. They are what the seaside history turned into.

What a visitor sees now

The layers are all still visible if you know what you are looking at.

Georgian and Regency terraces from the bathing period, particularly in Ramsgate. Victorian and Edwardian hotel and boarding-house stock along every seafront, much of it subdivided. Interwar amusement architecture at Dreamland. Post-war municipal work along the promenades. And then the recent layer, which is mostly conversion and reuse rather than new building.

The sands are unchanged, and they are the reason for all of it. Margate’s main beach and the bays around Broadstairs are the physical asset the entire two hundred and fifty years was built on, and they are the one part that has needed no restoration.

Two hundred years of visitors also left an institutional residue that outlasted the trade: friendly societies, a lifeboat station, gardens, promenades, bandstands and public baths, all built by a town whose income depended on being pleasant. Much of that fabric is now maintained by a district council with no seaside income to pay for it, which is the quiet fiscal legacy of the whole story.

Frequently asked questions

Why did people first come to Thanet?

For sea bathing, which was prescribed as a medical treatment in the eighteenth century. The resort economy grew out of medicine rather than leisure.

What is a bathing machine?

A wheeled hut taken into the shallows so a bather could enter the water unseen. A Margate Quaker, Benjamin Beale, is credited with adding the canvas hood that made the modern form.

How did visitors travel before the railway?

By sea. Sailing hoys ran from London, replaced by steamers from around 1815, which made the journey predictable and much more popular.

Why did the seaside trade collapse?

The package holiday. Guaranteed weather abroad at a competitive price removed the resort’s market within about two decades, and the specialised buildings had no alternative use.

What happened to the hotels?

Most were subdivided into flats and bedsits. That conversion is the origin of the housing conditions in parts of Cliftonville and the reason licensing schemes operate there.

Is the recovery the same trade returning?

No. It is short-stay, out-of-season and higher-spend, supporting different businesses from the week-long summer holiday economy that collapsed.