Bleak House, Broadstairs current owners opened the house as a wedding venue and guest house. Broadstairs, like many coastal places around England, had something of a reputation for smuggling in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The current establishment has a Smugglers Museum below deck. It is still possible to visit one of Charles Dickens' study rooms there. Bleak House, Broadstairs Bleak House (originally known as Fort House) is a prominent house on the cliff overlooking the North Foreland and Viking Bay in Broadstairs, Kent. It was built around 1801 and then substantially extended, doubling in size, in 1901. The house was the
Bleak House, Broadstairs the house held a special attraction for Dickens, and was the residence he "most desired" in his most favourite of watering places, Broadstairs. In the novel "Sophy Laurie", published in 1865, William Carew Hazlitt writes: "It is at Broadstairs they are staying; in the big, bleak house that stands alone on a peak of the chalk cliff, as if it were some sentinel set over the rovers up and down the sea." For much of the 20th century, Bleak House was in two quite distinct parts, serving as both a private residence and a Dickens memorial museum. In 2012 the