Adventures around Margatewith PlusBus
Beaches and birdwatching, cafés and caves, markets, museums and maritime history: Thanet is your oyster with fast trains and cheap buses. You can explore the whole area around Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs with a PlusBus ticket. This bargain add-on to your train ticket gives you unlimited bus travel all day. Here are just a few of the amazing things you could see.
-
-
1. Margate Caves
With the sandy beach a few steps from the station and fabulous attractions just minutes away like Dreamland and the Turner Contemporary, Margate is an ideal car-free destination. The fastest trains from London take 1½ hours, speeding through the South Downs and green Kent countryside with some great fares available if you book in advance. Add a PlusBus ticket for unlimited bus journeys.
- The Margate PlusBus area has a huge choice of visitor attractions you can reach easily by bus including the Spitfire and Hurricane museum or the Powell-Cotton museum at Birchington-on-Sea.
- One quirky attraction that’s five minutes by bus from Margate station is a network of caves in an eighteenth-century chalk mine. The Margate Caves, which reopened in 2019 with a new café and exhibition about their history and geology, have mysterious wall-paintings of an elephant, a crocodile, a hunt and lots more. Iron age remains have been found in the caves, but the paintings are more recent. This surprising subterranean gem was a huge tourist magnet in Victorian Margate.
- How do I get to Margate Caves by bus? Come out of the station and walk straight ahead towards the sea. You will find a group of colourful beachside eateries near here like the Sundeck Bar and award-winning Bus Café on an old double decker. Turn left a few steps along Canterbury Road to find Nayland Rock bus stop. You want the side of the road furthest from the station and nearest to the sea. Catch bus 8A (not Sundays) three stops to Dane Hill, where it stops almost outside the entrance to the caves. The bus runs every half an hour. On Sundays, you can catch hourly bus 8X from the station or hop on the LOOP bus one stop from Cecil Street.
-
-
2. Ramsgate Harbour
Your PlusBus ticket gives you unlimited travel all the way to Ramsgate and beyond so you could hop on the frequent LOOP bus from Dane Hill outside the caves (or from Stop M at the Cecil Street Council Offices in middle of Margate) and ride half an hour through the houses to Ramsgate Harbour, stopping off, if you want to, along the way.
- About twenty minutes from the caves, the bus stops at the Baptist Church in Broadstairs, close to the Dickens House Museum. There’s a great beach nearby, lots of great cafes, and almost every other building in Broadstairs seems to have a plaque announcing that Dickens stayed and wrote in it. Your PlusBus ticket is valid on the seasonal open-topped bus from here to Ramsgate Harbour.
- From the harbour, stroll back along the seafront or, if you’re on the LOOP bus, hop off at Wellington Crescent near the bandstand to visit the Ramsgate Tunnels. Volunteer guides lead torch-wielding visitors into the darkness of an old railway tunnel, where thousands of civilians lived during World War II. The commentary is an engaging mix of local history, engineering, anecdotes about everyday life underground (the stench of latrines and paraffin stoves) and a smattering of Blitz Spirit nostalgia
- In an old clocktower by the harbour, the Maritime Museum, when it’s open, has eclectic exhibits including musket shot and caulking mallets, pacifist graffiti from a military detention centre and a dolphin skeleton hanging in the rafters.
- One of the quirkiest attractions in an area that’s packed with them is called This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, a few minutes stroll up the High Street from Ramsgate Harbour. Opened in 2021, it’s a collection of experimental and obsolete technology including a working old-school telephone exchange and early computers.
-
3. Pegwell Bay
Time for a stroll in the country? You can walk all round the coast between Margate and Ramsgate with flower-topped cliffs, sandy beaches and craggy limestone arches. Beyond Ramsgate, it’s a couple of miles on foot or a short bus ride along the coast path to Pegwell Bay. Along the way, you’ll pass the eighteenth-century Belle Vue Tavern with an outdoor terrace overlooking miles of shining water, dotted with windsurfers.
- Walk on along the coast, past coastguard cottages and an old hovercraft port, to find a nature reserve, where you can spot seals and wading birds like dunlin, sanderling and various plovers. This watery landscape, has orchids in spring meadows and egrets wading among thickets of wild fennel.
- From the bus stop near a giant model Viking ship.
- Bus 34 runs hourly back until from nearby Leopold Street (Stop B) to the Nyland Rock bus stop by Margate railway station. The LOOP runs regularly from Ramsgate Harbour (Stop D) back to the centre of Margate until late at night and, if you’re in a rush, there are railway stations at Ramsgate and Broadstairs too.
