Other in Kent

Broadstairs is a small seaside town on the Isle of Thanet in Kent that has maintained its Victorian resort character more successfully than most of the southeast's coastal towns, its compact cliff-top streets, Victorian villas and the intimate Viking Bay below the town creating an atmosphere that retains genuine seaside charm without the tattiness that has overtaken some of its larger neighbours. The town is particularly associated with Charles Dickens, who spent many working holidays at Broadstairs between the 1830s and 1850s and wrote some of his most celebrated novels while staying in the town, and the annual Dickens Festival celebrates this connection with considerable enthusiasm. Bleak House, the cliff-top house now known as Dickens House where the novelist did much of his writing, is a distinctive feature of the Broadstairs cliff line and provides the most immediate visual reminder of the Dickens connection. The Dickens House Museum in the town covers the writer's association with Broadstairs in depth and provides context for the various locations around the town associated with his visits and his work. Dickens described Broadstairs as our English Watering Place in an essay of that title and his affection for the town was genuine and sustained, making the association one of the most authentic in English literary heritage. Viking Bay, the main beach at Broadstairs, is a sheltered, sandy cove below the cliff-face of the town, its compact scale and excellent sand making it one of the most popular beaches in Thanet. The beach is overlooked by the buildings of the town above, creating an enclosed and intimate beach environment quite different from the long, open beaches elsewhere in Kent. The chalk cliffs on either side of the bay and the coastal walking available between Broadstairs and the neighbouring towns of Margate and Ramsgate add a wider coastal dimension. The town also celebrates a Dickens Week each year and holds a Folk and Acoustic Festival with a well-established reputation in the UK festival calendar.

Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion and one of the most historically and architecturally significant Christian buildings in the world, a cathedral of nearly two thousand years of continuous worship whose Norman and Gothic architecture, extraordinary crypt and world-famous associations with the martyrdom of Thomas Becket make it one of the essential heritage destinations in England. The cathedral has been a place of Christian worship since the mission of St Augustine in 597 and is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior figure in the Church of England and the spiritual leader of the Anglican churches worldwide. The assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the cathedral in December 1170, cut down by four knights of Henry II at the altar steps of the north transept in circumstances that made the archbishop immediately a martyr of international significance, transformed Canterbury into one of the greatest pilgrimage centres in medieval Christendom. The shrine of St Thomas, erected over the saint's tomb and enriched over centuries with jewels and gold offered by grateful pilgrims, became one of the most visited pilgrimage destinations in Europe, a status celebrated in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Henry VIII destroyed the shrine in 1538 and appropriated its treasures, but the pilgrimage tradition is commemorated throughout the cathedral. The architecture of the cathedral spans nearly a thousand years of development from the Norman crypt of Archbishop Lanfranc, begun in 1070 and one of the finest Romanesque crypts in England, through the early Gothic of the Trinity Chapel and Corona where Becket's remains were translated, to the perpendicular Gothic of the fifteenth-century nave. The thirteenth-century stained glass in the Trinity Chapel windows, telling the story of miracles attributed to St Thomas, is among the finest medieval glass in existence. Canterbury's position on the medieval Pilgrim's Way from London to the cathedral and the survival of historic buildings including the West Gate and the ruins of St Augustine's Abbey provide a setting of considerable historical depth around the cathedral itself.

Rye Harbour Nature Reserve on the East Sussex coast is one of the most important shingle and coastal wetland nature reserves in southern England, a complex of habitats including shingle beach, saline lagoons, reedbeds, grazing marsh and scrub that together support an exceptional diversity of breeding, wintering and migrating birds and a nationally important flora of shingle and coastal plant communities. The reserve is managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust and covers approximately 1,700 hectares of the coastal plain between Rye and Camber. The shingle beach at Rye Harbour is one of the most ecologically significant areas of the reserve, its stable shingle ridges supporting populations of breeding little tern, one of Britain's rarest seabirds, as well as ringed plover, oystercatcher and common tern. The little tern colony is carefully protected during the breeding season and has been the focus of intensive conservation management over many years, with nest protection measures, warden presence and visitor management contributing to the maintenance of one of the most important populations of this species in the southeast. The lagoons created within the reserve provide habitat for avocet, black-headed gull and various duck species breeding in summer, while the winter brings large flocks of wildfowl including wigon, teal and pochard to the open water, and the reedbeds support bittern, marsh harrier and bearded tit in numbers that reflect the reserve's quality as a wetland habitat. The reserve is one of the best birding sites in Sussex throughout the year. The nearby medieval town of Rye, perched on its hill above the surrounding marsh and shingle, provides excellent visitor facilities and its own considerable historic interest, the combination of the reserve and the town making this part of the Sussex coast one of the most rewarding in the southeast.

The White Cliffs of Dover are among the most iconic natural features in Britain, a wall of bright white chalk rising up to 110 metres above the English Channel at the narrowest point of the strait that separates England from mainland Europe. Their significance in national consciousness derives partly from their geological drama and partly from their role as the first sight of England for travellers arriving by sea from the continent, a function they have served for travellers, refugees, traders, armies and returning residents throughout recorded history. The cliffs are composed of chalk laid down during the Cretaceous period approximately 65 to 100 million years ago, when the area now occupied by the English Channel was a warm, shallow sea. The accumulated remains of countless billions of microscopic marine organisms settled on the seabed and were compressed over geological time into the dense, white calcium carbonate rock visible in the cliff faces. The characteristic dark lines of flint nodules running through the chalk faces are formed from the siliceous remains of sponges, concentrated and consolidated along bedding planes as the chalk was buried and compressed. The seven-mile stretch of cliffs managed by the National Trust between Langdon Cliffs near the town of Dover and St Margaret's Bay provides the best walking access to the cliff edge, with dramatic views across the Channel to the French coast on clear days. The distance from the English coast to France is just 33 kilometres at its narrowest, and the chalk cliffs of Cap Blanc-Nez are clearly visible on the French side, a geological continuation of the same chalk formation interrupted by the Channel valley cut during the last Ice Age. The wartime history of the cliffs and the tunnels beneath Dover Castle, used as military headquarters during both World Wars, adds a layer of historical significance to the landscape's natural drama.