Inspiration of the Week: Georgian grandeur beside the sea

Jane Austen wasn’t sure about Ramsgate. In 1803, the author arrived in the Kent harbour to visit her brother, who was stationed there in the Napoleonic wars. A busy garrison town, it was full of soldiers and sailors – and, Austen felt, vice, sordidness and immorality. She would choose it as the site of Georgiana Darcy’s seduction by the caddish Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice.

It can’t have been too much of a dive, however. Wealthy holidaymakers of the time made a destination of Ramsgate’s assembly rooms, bathing machines and coffee houses, and a wealth of suitably salubrious architecture began to pop up. Among the town’s finest developments of the period is Nelson Crescent, where this listing lies – a row of tall townhouses, built 1798-1801, fronted with pagoda-style balconies and lacy fretwork. Built in the town’s heyday, the houses have wonderful views of that bustling harbour and all the architectural hallmarks of the period.

While we haven’t seen inside them, we’d wager few on this street are as handsome as this six-bedroom house, which has been renovated throughout in such a way that celebrates its heritage and makes perfect sense for modern life at the same time. Think elegant beaded panelling in one room, marble on the floor and a standalone tub in another. The kitchen perhaps best illustrates this two-pronged approach; here, new cabinetry, faintly Georgian in flavour, has been fitted with sleek brass pulls, which find both a counterpoint in the wooden floorboards and a friend in the marble worktop.

It’s hard not to see the appeal – and that’s before you’ve even stepped outside and taken in the “aery cliffs and glittering sands” that so enchanted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was, unlike his contemporary Austen, enraptured by the place, to which he’d retreat to “Ramsgatize”. Surely we should make that a thing?