Broadstairs - Entertainment and Leisure

Entertainment and Leisure

• The Broadstairs Dickens Festival is held annually in honour of the novelist Charles Dickens in the third week of June. A Christmas event in December is now part of the calendar. The festival includes a production of one of Dickens' novels and people about the town wearing Victorian dress. The festival first took place in 1937, when Gladys Waterer, the then owner of Dickens House, conceived the idea of commemorating the centenary of the author's first visit by putting on a production of David Copperfield, a novel written in the town.
• In the second week of August each year, the town holds the Broadstairs Folk Week music festival. The main acts perform at the Concert Marquee in the town's main park (Pierremont Park), but smaller gigs are also held in many pubs, restaurants and cafés as well as at the town's bandstand. The playing fields at Upton Junior School become a vast campsite (as visible on the Google Maps view of Broadstairs taken during a Folk Week in the mid-2000s) as the town's population swells with thousands of tourists, both the traditional folk reveller, and the curious visitor keen on imbibing seaside culture. Whilst Folk Week's origins are centred around Folk music and its appreciation, for many this period is simply an opportunity for general festivities in which pubs and bars have later opening hours and the main streets are closed to traffic in order that revellers may fully enjoy open air drinking and social merriment.
• Music continues throughout the year in the many pubs in the town. The popular Broadstairs Live!!! website carries up-to-date details of past and upcoming events.
• During the summer season, and on 5 November the town hosts firework displays every Wednesday evening on Viking Bay, with hundreds of people lining the overlooking cliff tops.