The Elms Vale Estate Company built the complex in 1937 as six separate dwellings, originally called Bay Cottages. The architectural style of the facade is Art Deco, with a Cape Dutch aesthetic on the final house, all rendered in white and mostly flat-roofed - one cottage carries a pantile roof for variety. The Dover District Council conservation area appraisal describes the design with admiring restraint. To anyone arriving from the coast path, however, the effect is more dramatic than the description suggests: a strip of low, geometric, sun-catching boxes pressed against the foot of a 300-foot chalk cliff, with the Channel directly at the door.

Sir Noel Peirce Coward (1899-1973), the playwright whose comedies had defined English wit between the wars, had owned Goldenhurst Farm in Aldington since 1926. The army requisitioned the farm during the Second World War, and by 1946 it needed significant renovation. As an interim measure, Coward took a lease at White Cliffs. He wanted the entire complex, but post-war housing restrictions limited him to a single property. So he persuaded friends and family to take the others: novelist Eric Ambler, his assistant Cole Lesley, his mother, and his aunt all signed leases. For five years - 1946 to 1951 - the row of cottages was effectively one extended Coward household, where guests came down from London to drink, sing around the piano, and walk the beach. Coward stayed until tourism crowded the bay; he later wrote about St Margaret's becoming a beach crowded with noisy hoi polloi. In 1956 he sold Goldenhurst and his London home, becoming a tax exile - a step that saved him money and brought him considerable public opprobrium. He moved to Bermuda, then to Firefly in Jamaica, with summers at Chalet Covar in Les Avants, Switzerland. The White Cliffs years are the last time he had a proper English home.

Coward sold the remaining lease to his friend Ian Fleming, who lived there from 1951 until the lease expired in 1957. By then Fleming had created James Bond - Casino Royale appeared in 1953, and Bond novels followed annually. The cottages thus held both halves of a certain kind of mid-century English writing life: Coward's brittle drawing-room comedies and Fleming's Cold War thrillers, both produced by the sound of the same Channel surf. Evelyn Waugh, visiting Fleming in 1955, recorded that complaint about the cottage being gruesomely small and ill furnished - but added that the party was gay, which from Waugh counted as endorsement.

After Fleming's lease ended in 1957, the houses continued as private dwellings, which they remain. The original six cottages have been sub-divided into four. In July 2025, BBC News reported that one of the cottages - the one where Ian Fleming wrote James Bond - was for sale, generating renewed attention to the row. They sit there still: white walls, flat roofs, the chalk face rising directly behind them, the Channel rolling in at the doorstep. The coast path runs along the cliffs above, and walkers looking down sometimes pause without quite knowing why. It is partly the unlikely Art Deco geometry against the geological scale of the cliffs. It is partly that the place feels exposed, intimate, slightly absurd. And it is partly that anyone who knows the history can hear, faintly, Coward at the piano or Fleming at his typewriter, the surf doing what the surf always does.