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
Broadstairs & 1494 ), "Brodestyr" (1479), "Broadstayer" (1565) and "Brod stayrs" (1610). Charles Culmer, son of Waldemar, is supposed to have reconstructed the stairs in 1350. In 1440, an archway was built by George Culmer across a track leading down to the sea, where the first wooden pier or jetty was built in 1460. A more enduring structure was to replace this in 1538, when the road leading to the seafront, known as Harbour Street, was cut into the rough chalk ground on which Broadstairs is built, by another George Culmer. Going further in defence of the town, he built the