STEM Workshops in Thanet

Thanet's coastline has a long transport engineering story. Ramsgate's harbour, developed from 1749 as a harbour of refuge after a violent storm, was declared a Royal Harbour by King George IV in 1821, a status unique in mainland Britain. From Ramsgate Harbour, Hoverlloyd began cross-Channel hovercraft services to Calais on 6 April 1966, moving in 1969 to a purpose-built hoverport at Pegwell Bay and later flying SR.N4 craft that each carried 254 passengers and 30 vehicles, before merging with Seaspeed in 1981 to form Hoverspeed and withdrawing from Ramsgate after the 1982 season. Inland, the Admiralty aerodrome at Manston was established in the winter of 1915 to 1916, was heavily bombed during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and later served as the civilian Kent International Airport from 1989 until the airport closed in 2014.

The Quaker physician John Coakley Lettsom founded the Sea Bathing Infirmary in Margate in 1791, later known as the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, where sunshine, fresh air and sea bathing were used to treat scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. A generation later, Broadstairs produced a notable Victorian railway engineer. Thomas Crampton, born there in 1816, worked under Marc Brunel before designing the Crampton locomotive, which proved more successful in France, Germany and Italy than in Britain. He also worked on the electric telegraph and designed a tunnel boring machine for a proposed Channel Tunnel. The 80-foot water tower he built for Broadstairs in 1859 now houses the Crampton Tower Museum.

As of September 2026, the Thanet Offshore Wind Farm, inaugurated in September 2010 with 100 turbines and 300 megawatts of capacity, is operated by Vattenfall. On land, EKC Broadstairs College on Ramsgate Road, part of the EKC Group, teaches engineering, manufacturing and automotive, computing and digital, and construction courses, and runs a Margate Digital Campus for creative technologies. The former RAF Manston airfield is home to the RAF Manston History Museum, which tells the airfield's story from its First World War origins.

EKC Broadstairs College offers T Levels and apprenticeships alongside its engineering, computing and construction courses, and is one of six community-based colleges in the EKC Group. In nearby Canterbury, the University of Kent offers degrees in engineering and digital design. Offshore, the Thanet Offshore Wind Farm, operated by Vattenfall, is a working example of renewable energy engineering on Thanet's own doorstep, not just a textbook subject.