A Coastal Weekend in Broadstairs

Walks, Bays and What to Pack

There's a reason Charles Dickens kept coming back to Broadstairs. The town still has the things that matter for a proper seaside weekend: golden bays wrapped in white chalk cliffs, a working harbour, ice cream that tastes better for the sea air, and enough walking to justify a second helping of everything.

It's also, refreshingly, a town that hasn't been renovated into something else. Margate has its art crowd and Ramsgate its grand harbour; Broadstairs has simply carried on being Broadstairs — flint lanes, a crescent of sand, and a horizon that does something different every hour.

Here's how to spend forty-eight hours doing it well.

Getting there

The easy version is the train. Broadstairs is on the Thanet loop, and the high-speed service from London St Pancras gets you there in a little over ninety minutes — quick enough that a Friday-evening arrival is entirely realistic. The classic-line services from Victoria and Charing Cross take longer but cost less, and the last stretch along the coast is worth a window seat either way.

Driving is straightforward, parking less so. In July and August the streets nearest Viking Bay fill by mid-morning, so aim for the edges of town and walk in — which, given that walking in is the whole point of the weekend, is no hardship. If you're staying centrally, ask your host about parking before you set off rather than after you arrive.

Either way, this is a weekend that works entirely on foot once you're here. Leave the car wherever it lands on Friday and forget about it until Sunday.

Saturday: bays and clifftops

Start at Viking Bay, the town's crescent-shaped centrepiece, before the day-trippers arrive. Early morning is when the bay is at its best — the sand raked flat by the tide, the jetty catching the first light, and the whole amphitheatre of the town rising up behind it.

The tide dictates the day here, and it's worth understanding that before you plan anything. At low water you can walk the sands between several of the bays; at high tide the promenade and clifftop paths take over, and some stretches of beach disappear entirely.

From Viking Bay, take the coastal path north past Stone Bay towards Joss Bay and the North Foreland lighthouse — about an hour of easy clifftop walking with the Channel doing its silver-grey theatre on your right. It's gentle going, largely level, and punctuated by the sort of benches that were clearly placed by someone who understood the assignment. North Foreland has the distinction of being the last lighthouse in the UK to be automated, which gives the walk a satisfying destination even though you can't go in.

Joss Bay is the one the surfers rate, with a surf school running through the season and a reliable break when the wind cooperates. Picnickers rate the grass above it, which has the better view and none of the sand-in-the-sandwiches problem.

Walk back through town for lunch, and give the afternoon to Broadstairs itself: the harbour, the flint-clad lanes, the little museum in the cottage that inspired Betsey Trotwood's house in David Copperfield, and Bleak House standing watch over it all from the cliff. Dickens wrote much of David Copperfield gazing out from that very spot — and it's worth knowing, since almost everyone gets it the wrong way round, that the house took its present name later. The novel Bleak House was written elsewhere; what happened here was the view, and the thinking.

The view, in fairness, has lost none of its plot potential.

Sunday: the Seven Bays

Ambitious walkers tackle the Seven Bays walk — Botany, Kingsgate, Joss, Stone, Viking, Louisa and Dumpton Gap — a route that strings together the best of Thanet's chalk coastline. Done end to end it's a comfortable half-day with stops, and every bay has its own character:

• Botany Bay is the photogenic one, with chalk stacks standing offshore like something left behind by a larger landscape. Best at low tide, which is also when the rock pools appear.
• Kingsgate Bay has the arch, the castle on the cliff above it, and the smallest crowds of the seven.
• Joss Bay is the surf bay, wide and open.
• Stone Bay is the quiet local favourite — the one people go to when they want a beach rather than a day out.
• Viking Bay is the main event: harbour, jetty, deck chairs, the lot.
• Louisa Bay is the pocket-sized one, tucked under the cliff and easy to walk straight past.
• Dumpton Gap marks the far end and the start of the walk round towards Ramsgate.

Time it with the tide tables and you'll do long stretches on firm sand beneath the cliffs. Get it wrong and you'll learn why locals check the tables first.

Either way, finish at Morelli's for a knickerbocker glory in a parlour that's been serving them since 1932. You'll have earned it, and the interior alone is worth the detour.

A serious word about the tide

This is the one part of the weekend to take properly seriously, and it's the reason locals sound slightly obsessive about tide tables.

The Thanet coast has a substantial tidal range, and several of the bays are backed by chalk cliffs with no way up. A stretch of sand that's a broad, obvious path two hours before low water can be gone entirely two hours after it. People get cut off here every summer, almost always because a walk took slightly longer than expected rather than because anyone was reckless.

The rules are simple: check the tide times before you set out, walk out on a falling tide rather than a rising one, know where the next set of steps is, and turn back early rather than pressing on. If you do get caught, don't try to swim or scramble — get to the highest safe point you can and call 999, asking for the Coastguard.

None of which should put you off. It's the same discipline as checking the weather before a hill walk: five minutes at the start, and then you can stop thinking about it.

Where to eat between the bays

Broadstairs punches well above its weight at the table. The harbour end does proper seaside food — fish straight off the day boats, eaten within sight of where it came from — while Albion Street's cafés handle the flat-white-and-brunch duties with surprising confidence.

Morelli's remains the non-negotiable: a 1932 ice cream parlour that is a listed monument of the knickerbocker era in everything but law, and which has resisted every temptation to modernise itself into anonymity.

Book dinner ahead in July and August. The town's best tables are few and famously loyal to their regulars, and a Saturday night walk-in is optimistic bordering on romantic.

What to pack (learned the hard way)

The Kent coast rewards light, practical packing.

Layers over bulk. Sea breeze is a season of its own. A light windproof beats a heavy coat, even in August, and packs into a bag you'll actually carry.

Footwear that does both. The classic coastal-weekend mistake is packing shoes for either the beach or the walking, and then suffering in both. Seasoned coast-walkers land on flat, flexible pairs that handle promenade miles, cliff paths and sandy shortcuts alike — well-made leather flat sandals are the one-pair answer in summer: room for your toes on the long stretches, a sole that bends with your foot on uneven ground, and smart enough for dinner in town afterwards without a change. A pair like the SAINT-TROPEZ leather sandals is the type to look for — a flexible sole, and leather straps that shape themselves to your foot within days rather than fighting it for a fortnight.

Tide tables and sun cream. The two items everyone forgets, in ascending order of consequence.

A swimsuit, regardless of forecast. Viking Bay at golden hour has converted firmer sceptics than you.

A dry bag or an old tote. For the wet swimsuit, the shells the children insist on, and the inevitable chalk-dusted socks.

Footwear, in slightly more detail

It sounds like a small thing. It is the single most common reason people cut a coastal weekend short.

Three surfaces are in play here and they ask for different things. Chalk clifftop paths are firm but uneven, and get slick after rain — you want grip and a sole flexible enough to feel what you're standing on. Sand is soft and drags at anything rigid, which is why stiff walking boots feel like hard work on the bays. And the town's flint and cobbled lanes are unforgiving of a thin, hard sole after a few miles.

The pair that handles all three tends to be flat, bendy and wide enough at the front for your toes to spread, because toe splay is how your foot stabilises itself on ground that isn't flat. Anything with a raised heel does the opposite on a slope.

Two practical notes for leather by the sea. First, salt water and leather are not friends: rinse sandals in fresh water if they've been in the sea, and let them dry naturally, away from radiators and direct sun — heat is what actually ruins leather, not water. Second, sand between a strap and your skin is the origin story of most seaside blisters, so shake everything out at the halfway point rather than pressing on. Straps that have moulded to your foot are worth looking after; they're the reason a second summer in the same pair is more comfortable than the first.

If the weather turns

It's the English coast. Sometimes it does.

The town absorbs rain better than most seaside places, largely because it was built before anyone assumed sunshine. There's the Dickens museum, a genuinely good bookshop culture, cafés that don't mind you staying, and the reliable pleasure of watching weather come in over the Channel from behind glass with something warm in your hands.

And a squall on a chalk coast is worth seeing at least once. Wrap up, walk the clifftop as far as the wind allows, and go back for the ice cream anyway. Morelli's does not check the forecast.

Beyond Broadstairs

If you stretch the weekend, three neighbours are all within a short hop. Margate has the Turner Contemporary, the vintage shops and Dreamland. Ramsgate has the only Royal Harbour in the country and a seafront of properly grand Georgian architecture. Pegwell Bay, further round, is a nature reserve of mudflats and marshland that's a serious birdwatching site and an unexpectedly beautiful place to end an afternoon.

The Viking Coastal Trail links much of it for anyone who'd rather cycle than walk, and it's flat almost throughout — this is Thanet, not the Lakes.

When to go

Summer is the obvious answer and the busiest one, with Folk Week in August turning the whole town into a stage and the Dickens Festival bringing out a startling quantity of period costume in June.

Spring and autumn are, quietly, better for walkers. The bays are yours, the light is better for photographs, the tide tables are the same, and every restaurant has a table.

Winter is for a specific kind of person, and if you're that kind of person you already know: an empty beach, a hard wind, and the best sky of the year.

Where the weekend sleeps

Broadstairs does accommodation with character rather than chains — harbour-view guesthouses, converted townhouses, and, at the top of the cliff and the top of the list, Bleak House itself, where you can sleep in a landmark that Dickens knew as Fort House and returned to summer after summer.

It's a rare thing to stay somewhere that's genuinely part of the story of the town rather than adjacent to it, and the view from the cliff is the same one that kept pulling a very busy novelist back to a small Kent seaside town for the best part of two decades.

Book ahead in summer. The secret of Broadstairs stopped being a secret sometime around 1850.

The simple formula

Some seaside towns trade on nostalgia. Broadstairs simply never stopped doing the things nostalgia is made of — which makes it less a trip back in time than a reminder of how good the simple formula still is.

Cliffs, sand, walking, ice cream. Repeat until Sunday evening, then start planning the next one on the train home.