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In this summer episode of ypompod, we got to the seaside – to Ramsgate, beloved of Queen Victoria and now home to the biggest Wetherspoon’s (in an elegant neo-Greek building called the Royal Pavilion of 1913) on the face of the planet.
Five miles to the east of Ramsgate, connected by a continuous yellow carpet of sand, lies Margate, which developed as one of Britain’s first seaside resorts in the mid eighteenth century. Ramsgate did not get into its stride until after the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815 (a street is called The Plains of Waterloo). By then, the Prince Regent had given royal approval to the seaside by building his Marine Pavilion at Brighton. In 1821, as George IV, he took a ship from Ramsgate to visit Hanover (he was cross with Dover for supporting his wife, Queen Caroline, in the couple’s tragi-comic divorce battle); an obelisk commemorates the event, as does the name of the Royal Harbour. A guidebook of 1846 pronounced that ‘of the three watering places in the Isle of Thanet, Ramsgate is considered as the most fashionable.’
Telescopes, donkey rides, German bands – Ramsgate had everything to delight the Victorian visitor. At nightfall Mr Fuller’s ‘famed marine library’, came into its own – not only a repository of books but a musical hall, a bazaar and a very mild kind of casino, where a shilling stake might win you a cake of soap, a bottle of hair oil or a wooden spade. Lumbering wooden bathing machines with a deep canvas hood at one end and a horse at the other would be trundled into the water and turned around, while drivers and horses splashed back to the beach; bathers then issued from beneath the canvas hood, which reached down to the sea.
The English seaside is now back in fashion – at least Clive thinks so. He and his family have a house in Ramsgate. He’s happy to share the secrets of the town with John and anyone else who’s listening!
