From a gap in the cliffs to the only Royal Harbour: the story of Ramsgate

Ramsgate takes its name from the landscape. The name is usually traced to Old English words meaning a raven's gap, a reference to the break in the chalk cliffs where the town grew up between what are now the East Cliff and the West Cliff. The earliest written forms, Remmesgate and Remisgat, appear in the Kent Hundred Rolls of 1274 to 1275, and by 1357 the spelling Ramesgate was in use.

The coast to the west carries older stories. Tradition places St Augustine's landing in 597 on this stretch of coast, and a carved cross in Saxon style, put up in the 19th century beside Cottington Road at Cliffsend, marks what is traditionally held to be the landing place. On the cliff top at Pegwell Bay stands Hugin, a replica Viking ship that sailed over from Denmark in 1949 to mark the 1,500th anniversary of the invasion of Britain that legend credits to Hengist and Horsa.

For most of the Middle Ages Ramsgate was a small fishing place. It became a limb, or member, of the Cinque Ports, attached to one of the head ports of that medieval confederation rather than ranking as a port in its own right.

The town's fortunes turned on one bad night. In December 1748 a storm tore ships from their anchors in the Downs, the sheltered roadstead off the east Kent coast, and drove them onto the shores of Thanet. Some found safety in Ramsgate's small harbour, and the call went up for a proper place to receive ships in trouble. An Act of Parliament in 1749 authorised a new harbour, and work on the East Pier began that year, intended for vessels of up to 200 tons.

Building a harbour on an open shore proved difficult, and silt kept filling the basin. The engineer John Smeaton was brought in during the 1770s and went on improving the harbour until his death in 1792. The cross wall, with sluices to scour the main harbour, dates from 1779, and a dry dock followed in 1791. John Rennie made further changes in 1812.

The new harbour soon had a military role. Through the long wars with France, from 1793 to 1815, troops, horses and equipment were shipped from Ramsgate to the continent, and the harbour was one of the chief embarkation points of the Napoleonic Wars. The Clock House on the quay, built around 1817, records Ramsgate's own mean time, 5 minutes and 41 seconds ahead of Greenwich.

In 1821 George IV, who had been well received on several visits to the town, granted the harbour the right to call itself royal. It remains the only Royal Harbour in the United Kingdom. During his stays the King lodged at Cliff House on the West Cliff with Sir William Curtis, and an obelisk on the approach to the East Pier, known locally as the Royal Toothpick, records the honour. The Royal Standard is still flown in the town on three days a year linked to George IV: 29 January, 19 July and 12 August.

By then Ramsgate was also a resort. The first recorded sea-bathing business, two sheds rated to James Hawkesley, appears in 1764, and by the early 1800s more than twenty bathing machines worked the sands. Before 1790 there was no substantial house on either cliff; by 1837 the town was largely built up with Regency houses. Princess Victoria first came in 1823, aged four, and stayed in Ramsgate with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, several times in the 1820s and 1830s, at Townley House and at Albion House.

The crowded beach of those years was painted by William Powell Frith in Ramsgate Sands, worked on from 1851 and shown at the Royal Academy in 1854. Victoria, by then Queen, bought it, and it is still in the Royal Collection.

Steam brought the next wave of visitors. The South Eastern Railway reached Ramsgate in 1846 by way of Ashford and Canterbury. In 1863 the London, Chatham and Dover Railway opened a second line, which dropped through a tunnel almost a mile long to a station right beside the harbour. The two companies' stations stood apart for over sixty years, until on 2 July 1926 the Southern Railway opened a new link line and the present Ramsgate station, closing both older stations. The harbour station was sold off and turned into a funfair called Merrie England.

Some notable residents left their mark in stone. Sir Moses Montefiore bought East Cliff Lodge in 1831 and built a private synagogue on the estate, opened in 1833, followed in 1862 by a domed mausoleum where he and his wife, Lady Judith, are buried. On the West Cliff the architect Augustus Pugin built his own house, The Grange, in the 1840s, and beside it the church of St Augustine, which he paid for out of his own fees. Pugin died in 1852 and his tomb is in the church; both buildings are listed Grade I.

In April 1876 a 23-year-old Vincent van Gogh arrived to work at Mr Stokes's small boarding school at 6 Royal Road. His letters from that spring describe walks around the town, and he made two small sketches of the view from the school. Ramsgate became a municipal borough in 1884, and from 1901 electric trams linked it with the other towns of Thanet.

Ramsgate prepared for air attack earlier than most towns. The Duke of Kent formally opened its deep shelter tunnels on 1 June 1939, three months before war broke out. With entrances around the town, about two and a half miles of shelter tunnels were added to the old railway tunnel down to the harbour, and the network was designed to shelter up to 60,000 people. Once the raids began, the railway tunnel became an underground town with more than a thousand permanent residents.

In May 1940 the Royal Harbour became the main assembly point for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk. The little ships sailed from here, and about 43,000 soldiers passed through Ramsgate and were carried inland on 82 special trains. A Royal Navy Coastal Forces base, HMS Fervent, operated from the harbour from 1939 to 1945, and memorials on the quay remember Dunkirk and the 1942 Channel Dash.

After the war the harbour looked to the Channel again. On 6 April 1966 Hoverlloyd began passenger hovercraft crossings from the Royal Harbour to Calais, and in 1969 the service moved to a purpose-built hoverport at Pegwell Bay, where the large SR.N4 craft ran until 1982. Sally Ferries began sailings to Dunkirk in 1981, a new approach road to the port opened in 2000, and TransEuropa ran ferries to Ostend until April 2013. No ferry service has used the port since.

Inland, the airfield at Manston, used by aircraft from 1915 and later a civil airport, closed on 15 May 2014. Rail links went the other way: high-speed trains to St Pancras began in December 2009, and Thanet Parkway station opened near Cliffsend on 31 July 2023.

Ramsgate's buildings have become its calling card. In 2017 Historic England named it one of the first ten Heritage Action Zones in England, and since 2014 part of the wartime tunnel network has been open to visitors. The 2021 census counted 42,027 people in the town, which still works its harbour for fishing, for servicing offshore wind farms and for border patrols, beside its marina.