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 2011 Dickens Festival ran from Saturday 18th to Friday 24th June.
The 2011 Festival was blessed not blessed with good weather but this did not stop most of the events taking place.
More information about the annual festival and other events during the year is always available on their website.

Pictures of the 2011 week can be found here, and includes a snippet of video taken during the third Victorian bathing party.

Bleak House

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.

Apparently the house is on the market once again, so what will become of it in future is all in the air at present.