Ramsgate Maritime Museum

Ramsgate Maritime Museum focuses strongly on Ramsgate and its immediate environs, with a brief introduction to the rest of the region's maritime past. The museum, set in the heart of the country's only Royal Harbour, is an exhibit in its own right, being the product of some of the most eminent civil engineers and architects of the early 19th century. It is the site of the unique Ramsgate Meridian - from which Ramsgate's own particular Mean Time - 5 mins 41 secs ahead of Greenwich - was calculated!

There are four galleries of exhibits telling the maritime history of the area with permanent displays on the development of the Harbour, Navigation, Fishing, Lifeboats and Shipwrecks.

The nearby Goodwin Sands have yielded an important collection of artefacts from the Great Storm Wrecks of 1703, principally from the wreck of the Stirling Castle (a 70 gun, 3rd rate, Man of War). Weapons, utensils and ship's gear provide a chilling insight into life and death aboard a British Warship in 1703. A fifth exhibition space, the Gun Room, houses a conservation lab/display area instituted to house the largest artefact yet to be raised from the wreck of Stirling Castle, a 17th century 32-pounder demi-cannon - one of the Stuart Navy's hardest-hitting pieces of ordnance.

In the Inner Basin is moored the Dunkirk Little Ship Sundowner. In 1940 she rescued 130 men from the Dunkirk beaches and brought them back to Ramsgate. Visits to the Sundowner are by prior arrangement only.

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