Crampton Tower Museum, Broadstairs

Crampton Tower Museum stands opposite Broadstairs railway station in a distinctive flint-built water tower that once formed part of the town's original water supply. It is dedicated to the life and work of Thomas Russell Crampton (1816–1888), a Broadstairs-born civil and mechanical engineer whose achievements ranged well beyond the town itself.

Crampton is best remembered as the designer of the Crampton locomotive, a fast express engine widely adopted in France and Germany during the mid-nineteenth century, and as the engineer who in 1851 laid the first successful submarine telegraph cable between Dover and Calais, linking Britain to continental Europe. The museum displays models, drawings, photographs and artefacts covering his railway locomotives, his water-supply schemes (including the one that fed this very tower), and his pioneering telegraph work.

The building is compact, run by volunteers, and typically open on a seasonal basis. It's a straightforward stop of interest to anyone who likes railway history, Victorian engineering, or the lesser-known figures who shaped the industrial age. Broadstairs seafront and Viking Bay are a short walk downhill from the museum.