Ramsgate has the only Royal Harbour in the world - George IV granted the title in 1821 after sailing from it. Construction had begun in 1749 and dragged on for a century, the basin cut by hand into the chalk. Because the harbour faced France, Ramsgate became the embarkation port for both the Napoleonic Wars and, more famously, the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Long before either, in AD 597, the missionary Augustine landed at Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet just a mile up the coast - sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the English. He became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Twelve centuries later, that landing was still strong enough in the local memory to bring Pugin here.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin is famous for designing the interior of the Palace of Westminster - the wallpaper, the tiles, every Gothic detail of the room where Parliament sits. Less famous: he wanted to live in the Middle Ages. He bought a sloping field on the West Cliff in 1843, moved his family into a flint-faced house called The Grange in October 1844, and immediately began building a church next door at his own expense. He paid for everything because that way nobody could tell him no. He wrote that "not one of the true principles will be broken." St Augustine's Church, completed by 1852, is considered the most personal of his designs - the building where his theory of Gothic Revival architecture was free of compromise. Across the road his son Edward later designed St Augustine's Abbey, the first Benedictine monastery in England since the Reformation. The Grange is Grade I listed and influenced British domestic architecture for the rest of the century. Pugin died on 14 September 1852, a few hours after walking into his church and remarking how beautiful it was.

Down the cliff toward East Cliff Lodge once stood the country estate of Sir Moses Montefiore, the most prominent British Jewish philanthropist of the 19th century. In 1833 the architect David Mocatta built him a small Regency synagogue in elegant private style - one of the oldest surviving purpose-built synagogues in Britain. Beside it stands a thing harder to expect: a near-exact replica of Rachel's Tomb on the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, built as Sir Moses and Lady Judith's mausoleum. Montefiore had restored the original tomb in Israel in 1841, after obtaining permission from the Ottoman Sultan. When he buried his wife in 1862, he built her a copy of it on the Kent cliffs. He joined her in it in 1885, aged 100. A few hundred yards away lies the Ramsgate Jewish Cemetery, established in 1872 by Benjamin Norden: 400 graves behind a flint wall, with the Hebrew inscription above the door reading "The dead will the Lord make live."

Townley House, opposite Chatham House Grammar School, was designed in 1780 by Mary Townley - one of England's earliest female architects. While she was still a princess, the future Queen Victoria spent holidays in Ramsgate and stayed at Townley House. The Duchess of Kent and the young Victoria also took rooms at Albion House for several months in 1835, a few years before she came to the throne. Albion House had been built in 1791 as part of a smart new development on the cliff, became a gentleman's club, then a boarding house, then Ramsgate Council's offices for seventy years, then a boutique hotel in 2014. The ground-floor restaurant is named Townley's, after Mary. Across town, Edward Welby Pugin built the Granville Hotel in 1869 - eight enormous houses run together as one of the Victorian seaside's most ambitious resort hotels. It is private apartments now. The Royal Victoria Pavilion on the seafront, opened in 1904 as a theatre, is the largest Wetherspoons pub in the country.

Ramsgate's railway station, built between 1924 and 1926 by Edwin Fry, has been called "possibly the finest New Classical railway station in southern England." It is Grade II listed. Most people arriving at Ramsgate today come through this hall of pale stone and step out onto a hill above the Royal Harbour, with Pugin's cliffside church directly ahead. The library, originally built by Andrew Carnegie in 1904, burned down on Friday 13 August 2004, just two months short of its centenary. Suspicions were raised - the town's registry office burned around the same time - but the inquest could not pinpoint a cause. The new library was rebuilt inside the shell of the old one and reopened in 2009. The pattern of Ramsgate is consistent across all of these buildings: ambition larger than the town strictly needed, mostly preserved, occasionally lost, frequently surprising. Pugin would have approved.