2 Victoria Parade, Broadstairs - 01843 577577 info@visitbroadstairs.co.uk

Broadstairs is a coastal town on the Isle of Thanet in East Kent, 76 miles (122 km) east of London with a population of about 22,000. Situated between Margate and Ramsgate, it is one of the seaside resorts on the Isle of Thanet, known as the "Jewel in Thanet's crown". The town's crest motto is "Stella Maris - Star of the Sea". As a civil parish, it includes the St. Peter's area and is known as Broadstairs and St. Peters.

The town spreads from Poorhole Lane in the west (named from the mass graves dating from the Black Death) to Kingsgate in the north (named after the landing of King Charles II in 1683) and to Dumpton in the south (named after the yeoman Dudeman who farmed there in the 13th century). Reading or Redyng Street was established by Flemish refugees in the 1600s.

The inland village of St Peters established after the building of a parish church in about 1080. A nearby fishing settlement developed in the 14th century known as Bradstow. Old English for "broad-stairs", it was named after stairs carved in the chalk cliffs, leading to the beach from the cliff-top 12th-century Shrine of St Mary. Charles Culmer, son of Waldemar, is supposed to have built the stairs for the fishermen in 1350. The stairs have survived to this day and were first repaired by Richard Culmer over three hundred years after their original construction.

In 1440, an archway was built by George Culmer across a track leading down to the sea, where the first wooden pier or jetty was built in 1460. A more enduring structure was to replace this in 1538, when the road leading to the seafront, known as Harbour Street, was cut into the rough chalk ground on which Broadstairs is built, by another George Culmer. Going further in defence of the town, he built the York Gate in 1540, a portal that still spans Harbour Street and which then held two heavy wooden doors that could be closed in times of threat from the sea. Richard Culmer was the son of Sir Richard Culmer by his first wife and was born in 1640/41. Richard was buried in the parish church of Monkton, on the Isle of Thanet. Of his legacies was the endowment on Broadstairs of an area of six acres (24,000 m²) of ground for the poor of the parish. The name survives to this day as "Culmer's Allotment" as does the allotment.

In 1723, Broadstairs had a population of about 300. A brief outline of the history of Broadstairs Pier is given in Broadstairs, past and present, which mentions a storm in 1767, during which Culmer's work was all but destroyed. At this time it was of considerable importance to the fishing trade with catches as far afield as Great Yarmouth, Hastings, Folkestone, Dover and Torbay and elsewhere being landed. It had become so indispensable that the corporations of Yarmouth, Dover, Hythe and Canterbury with assistance from the East India Company and Trinity House subscribed to its restoration with a payment of £2,000 in 1774.

By 1795, York Gate needed repair to repel any threat from the French Revolutionary Wars; the subsequent renovation was undertaken by Lord Hanniker in the same year as the first lightship was placed on the Goodwin Sands.

On the occasion of the landing at Thanet, of Major John Percy, on 21 June 1815 with the captured French eagle standard taken at Waterloo, a tunnel stairway from the beach to the fields on the clifftops above was excavated, and christened Waterloo Stairs to commemorate the event. Broadstairs was supposedly the first town in England to learn of this historic victory although there is no written evidence of this.

Smuggling was an important industry in the area and the men of Broadstairs and St Peters became very good at outwitting customs agents. This was very profitable because of the very high duty payable on tea, spirits and tobacco. There is a network of tunnels and caves strewn in the chalk strata which were used by smugglers to hide their contraband.

By 1824 steamboats were becoming more common, having begun to take over from the hoys and sailing packets about 1814. These made trade with London much faster. The familiar sailing hoys took anything up to 72 hours to reach Margate from London, whereas the new steamships were capable of making at least nine voyages in this time. Mixed feelings must have been strongly expressed by the Thanet boatmen in general, as the unrivaled speed of the steam packet was outmanoeuvering all other classes of vessel, but it brought a new prosperity to Thanet. In the middle of the 19th century, the professional classes began to move in. By 1850, the population had reached about 3,000, doubling over the previous 50 years. Due to the fresh sea air, many convalescent homes for children opened towards the end of the 19th century.

Although numerous holidaymakers were attracted to Broadstairs and to other Thanet seaside towns during the Victorian era, it was not directly served by the railways until 1863. This was time of great expansion for railways in the South East; in 1860 Victoria Station had been completed, followed by Charing Cross and Cannon Street. Rail access to Broadstairs had previously relied heavily upon coach links to other railway stations in the district or region; with firms such as Bradstowe Coachmasters, operated by William Sackett and John Derby, principally involved. Their coaches connected Broadstairs to Whitstable station where a railway service had begun as early as 1830 (one of the first in England, with its pioneering Stephenson's engine Invicta). By 1851, the region's network was still more complete, being supplemented by the London to south coast route, including the coastal link from Chichester to Ramsgate, the cross-country service between London and Dover and the Mid-Kent line that linked Redhill, Tonbridge and Ashford to London's new terminal at Waterloo (opened in 1848). Broadstairs station (unlike neighbouring Margate) is a 10 minute walk from the beach. Although rebuilt in the 1920s electricity was not installed at the station until well into the 1970s and the buildings and platforms remained illuminated by gaslight until then.

In 1841, 44 mariners were recorded as resident in Broadstairs; nine of these being specified as fishermen, and of course the residual boat-building activity that remained after the Culmer~White yard closed in 1824 (under pressure from the steamships), still continued (though there were only four shipwrights recorded in the census: Solomon Holbourn and Joseph Jarman among them). Others may have been at sea on census day: Steamer Point, as the pier head at Broadstairs was then known, would have been fairly busy with shipping movements since consignments of coal and other produce would have been traded along the coast and there would have been regular work on the steam packet to and from Ramsgate. By the 1840s, the smuggling had ceased.

By 1910, the population had reached about 10,000. A "guide book" of the 1930s by A H Simison (the photographic chemist) entitled Ramsgate (The Kent Coast at its best) Pictorially Presented, describes Broadstairs town as having approached modernisation and urban development "always with a consistent policy of retaining those characteristics for which it has for so long been renowned". The town has retained a great many aspects of historical interest, besides its maritime history. Amongst these is its notable religious history, evoked by places such as the Shrine of Our Lady, Bradstowe.

Today Broadstairs is a magnet for visitors year after year and has been likened to a "Cornish fishing town"