Ramsgate Sands

Ramsgate was a tourist destination and its Sands were a chief attraction...

"It is impossible to speak too favourably of this first-rate town, its glorious sands, its bathing, its hotels, libraries, churches, etc. etc. not forgetting its bracing climate" The Official Illustrated Guide to South-Eastern and North and Mid-Kent Railways (1863)

Ramsgate tourists were catered to by hawkers, photographers and itinerant musicians on the Sands themselves. They were sold mineral water and potted shrimps from Pegwell Bay.

A daguerreotype of Ramsgate Sands around 1870, by pioneering photographer Valentine Blanchard, shows a Punch and Judy show, a hawker with a basket and bathing machines in action.

Wilkie Collins often stayed in Ramsgate during the summer months. In his novel 'Poor Miss Finch', he describes an animated scene on the beach in the later part of the day. He says 'all sorts of diversions were going on', listing monkeys, organs, girls on stilts, a conjurer and a troop of minstrels among them.

In Collins' novel, his characters hire chairs to sit on the Sands and enter into conversation with 'a nice old lady' who produces sherry and biscuits from her bag. The Sands are described as 'pleasant', with the 'bright blue sea beyond' and 'glorious sunshine overhead'. The 'bustling enjoyment of the crowd' is not for everyone, however. To some the crowd is a 'mob' of 'less refined' people.

His character Lucilla keeps a journal during her stay in Ramsgate. It reveals that the Sands were ideal for people-watching - she spies a retired Indian officer and a woman in a dress 'of a peculiar colour' - and also for private conversation. She meets with a man on the cliff stairs, walks arm in arm with him on the pier and sits beside him on a bench 'beneath the stone parapet of the pier'.

In a later novel, The Fallen Leaves, Collins describes the soundscape of the Sands ...

"From the beach, the cries of children at play, the shouts of donkey-boys driving their poor beasts, the distant notes of brass instruments playing a waltz, and the mellow music of the small waves breaking on the sand"

The business on the Sands is also wonderfully portrayed in an engraving drawn by W. McConnell in 1864 which shows donkeys and bathing machines in action as well as a Punch & Judy show...