Ramsgate is a town on the move. It has coastal walks, bargain bike hire and good buses, and is 75 minutes from London on a high-speed train. It’s dynamic in other ways too, fizzing with new projects like its Festival of Sound, a crowdfunding drive to turn an old barge into a floating arts centre and the Active Ramsgate initiative, which promotes newly signed walking and cycling routes, kayaking, kitesurfing, geocaching and golf.
At low tide, you can stroll past white cliffs on long sandy beaches for seven miles from Ramsgate to Margate, passing rock pools and cafes and under a chalk cliff arch between Kingsgate and Botany bays.
I amble over the first couple of surf-edged miles to Broadstairs, stopping for a swim and a cup of tea on the way.
“Charles Dickens never lived here,” reads a slate-carved sign on a house near an Old Curiosity Shop. Almost every other building in Broadstairs seems to have a plaque announcing that Dickens stayed and wrote in it, and there’s a castellated Bleak House on the cliffs above.
You can catch…
