A Personal Perspective on Broadstairs

Dickens Festival

Each year for the past 72 years there has been a celebration of Charles Dickens. The Dickens Festival is held each year in June, during this week it is impossible to walk through Broadstairs without bumping into characters from his novels!

There are several locations in Broadstairs associated with Charles Dickens, perhaps the best known is Bleak House overlooking the Jetty at Viking Bay. Charles Dickens stayed in Broadstairs for his summer holidays and wrote much of David Copperfield in Bleak House. He also based the cottage where Betsey Trotwood lived on a house at Broadstairs, which is now the Dickens House Museum in Victoria Parade.

The 2010 Dickens Festival ran from Saturday 19th to Friday 25th June.
The 2010 Festival was blessed with some of the best weather Broadstairs has seen recently apart from a few showers at the start which did not stop the annnual Victorian cricket match.
More information about the annual festival and other events during the year is always available on their website.

Pictures of the 2010 week can be found here.
Here is a snippet of video taken during the second Victorian bathing party in 2010.

Bleak House announcement

Bleak House is sadly no longer a museum but a private house. The museum was supported entirely privately and had no support from the local council or any national body, and I am aware that it had become increasingly difficult for it to continue in the face of mounting costs and falling visitor numbers.

The good news is that the new owners still try to open the property during the annual Dickens Festival and Folk Week if the situation permits.