The Devonhurst East Live Cam

The Devonhurst hotel stands on the cliff at Broadstairs, on the Isle of Thanet at the eastern tip of Kent. The camera looks out over Stone Bay and the North Sea.

Charles Dickens spent summers in this town for twenty years and wrote parts of several books here. The house on the cliff he used, then called Fort House, took the name Bleak House afterwards, though the novel is set elsewhere.

Thanet was an island until the channel behind it silted up in the sixteenth century. The chalk here is the same seam as the cliffs at Dover, and the seven bays along this stretch each sit in a gap in it.