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 far the most effective of the RNLI craft stationed there. Broadstairs' lifeboats were further supported by a fund established in the 1860s by Sir Charles Reed FSA. Broadstairs is within the Thanet local government district. The town contains the five electoral wards of Bradstowe, St Peter's, Beacon Road, Viking and Kingsgate. These wards have eleven of the fifty six seats on the Thanet District Council. At the 2007 local elections, all eleven of those seats were held by the Conservative Party. Broadstairs and St Peter's Town Council has 15 members, who are elected every four years, led by the mayor.