Ramsgate is the only harbour in the United Kingdom permitted to use the title 'Royal' - a designation granted by King George IV in 1821, after he embarked from here on his first trip to Hanover and returned to find the town and his welcome touching enough to honour. The harbour is genuinely impressive: a 700-berth marina called the Royal Harbour Marina, sheltered from estuary storms by long stone arms, with 12,000 visiting boats recorded in 2005. The renovated arches under Royal Parade now host marine businesses where Victorian carriages once sheltered. For most of the 20th century the Port of Ramsgate ran cross-Channel ferries to Dunkirk and Ostend; Sally Ferries operated until shortly before Transeuropa Ferries ceased operations in April 2013. Fishing remains, though in decline - the most valuable fish landings in Kent come ashore here, but the fleet shrinks year by year. The fishing industry of the 19th century has been replaced by tourism, by English-language schools, by the looming presence of the Thanet Offshore Wind Project just visible from shore.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin moved to Ramsgate in 1843, built a house called The Grange overlooking the harbour, and then built next door the church of St Augustine - begun in 1846 - in a defiantly authentic Gothic Revival style. He paid for it himself. He used local Kent flint and traditional medieval construction methods, and refused the kind of cast-iron and stucco shortcuts that ornamented most Victorian churches. Pugin had also designed the interior decoration of the new Palace of Westminster, including the iconic clock face of what we now call Big Ben. By the time he died in 1852 at the age of 40, he had produced an extraordinary body of work that essentially defined how Victorian England wanted its religious buildings to look. He is buried in the church he built. In 2012 it was designated a shrine to the saint whose landing the building commemorates - ending the absence left by the destruction of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury during the English Reformation. The shrine sits 11 nautical miles from the abbey ruins.

At Pegwell Bay, just south of Ramsgate, sits a 76-foot replica Viking longship called Hugin. She was a gift from the Danish government in 1949 to commemorate the 1,500th anniversary of the legendary landing of the brothers Hengist and Horsa - the Anglo-Saxon chieftains traditionally credited with leading the first Germanic conquest of Britain in AD 449. Fifty-three Danes crewed Hugin and sailed her from Esbjerg in Denmark to Pegwell Bay in just over three weeks, recreating the voyage. She has been displayed on the cliff at Pegwell ever since, weathering decades of salt wind. Below her on the bay, deep wartime shelter tunnels carved beneath Ramsgate during the Second World War have been open to the public for guided tours since 2014. The tunnels could shelter 60,000 people during air raids - more than twice the town's population - and they still smell of damp chalk and forgotten emergencies. Above them, on the streets of Ramsgate proper, a small population of feral rose-ringed parakeets nest in the trees, their origin uncertain. Some sources guess they descended from birds that escaped trading ships from British India in the 19th century. Nobody knows for sure.

Ramsgate's architecture is largely Regency and Victorian, the result of its 18th- and 19th-century resort boom. There are 900 listed buildings in the town, more than 200 of them clustered around the harbour - making this one of the densest concentrations of protected historic architecture on the south coast. Townley House, designed by the female 18th-century architect Mary Townley, is among the most distinguished. Ramsgate Library was built and paid for by Andrew Carnegie in 1904; on the evening of Friday 13 August 2004, just two months short of its centenary, it was destroyed by fire. Suspicions were raised - a similarly timed blaze had struck Aberdeen House, the town's registry office - but the cause was never established. The library was painstakingly restored and reopened on 20 February 2009. Ramsgate Maritime Museum near the quayside features in the 2018 romantic comedy Juliet, Naked as the fictional Sandcliff Museum where Rose Byrne's character works. Russell Hoban's 1980 post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker repurposes Ramsgate as 'The Ram,' seat of a future government in a Britain reduced to feudal scattered villages. The town keeps absorbing fictions about itself, which is what places this old learn to do.