Qualla: Ramsgate

Ramsgate: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some time in AD 597, a Roman missionary named Augustine landed on a beach in Kent with about forty companions, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the English. He had stopped in Gaul to lose his nerve and been ordered to continue anyway. The beach was at what is now Ramsgate, and the moment was the formal beginning of organised Christianity in England. Fourteen centuries later, in March 2012, the Roman Catholic church of St Augustine on Ramsgate's West Cliff - designed by the great Gothic Revivalist Augustus Pugin in 1847 - was declared a shrine to St Augustine of Canterbury, ending a five-century absence of any such shrine since the original at Canterbury was destroyed in the Reformation. Ramsgate, in other words, has a way of holding history in unusually long arcs.

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Ramsgate: The Royal Harbour

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ramsgate is the only harbour in the United Kingdom permitted to use the title 'Royal' - a designation granted by King George IV in 1821, after he embarked from here on his first trip to Hanover and returned to find the town and his welcome touching enough to honour. The harbour i...

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Ramsgate: Pugin's Gothic Revival

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin moved to Ramsgate in 1843, built a house called The Grange overlooking the harbour, and then built next door the church of St Augustine - begun in 1846 - in a defiantly authentic Gothic Revival style. He paid for it himself. He used local Kent flint...

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Ramsgate: Hugin the Viking Ship

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At Pegwell Bay, just south of Ramsgate, sits a 76-foot replica Viking longship called Hugin. She was a gift from the Danish government in 1949 to commemorate the 1,500th anniversary of the legendary landing of the brothers Hengist and Horsa - the Anglo-Saxon chieftains traditiona...

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Ramsgate: Listed Buildings and Lost Libraries

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ramsgate's architecture is largely Regency and Victorian, the result of its 18th- and 19th-century resort boom. There are 900 listed buildings in the town, more than 200 of them clustered around the harbour - making this one of the densest concentrations of protected historic arc...

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