Welcome to the new Margate: AKA Shoreditch-on-Sea
After years in decline, are our beach resorts having a renaissance? Joe Shute begins a tour of the Great British seaside on Kent’s coast
If TS Eliot’s protagonist, J Alfred Prufrock, famously measured the passage of time in coffee spoons, then Carol Wynn does it in wallpaper. Sitting in the bar of her Margate hotel, which was once frequented by the poet, she takes a look at the faded fittings and surmises its decline.
“The Regency wallpaper became emulsion paint, and then eventually it turned to chipboard,” she says with a fag-rattled sigh. “Society just became somehow different.”
Opened on Margate’s Royal Crescent in 1885, entwined with wrought-iron balustrades and offering breathtaking views over the beach, the Nayland Rock Hotel was once among the grandest destinations on the south coast.
In the roaring Twenties, Charlie Chaplain entertained in the ornate dining rooms and Eliot came to recuperate from a nervous collapse; he wrote The Waste Land in a Victorian seaside pavilion a few minutes away. Even as recently as 1990, the Rolling Stone Mick Jagger chose the hotel for a party to celebrate the golden wedding anniversary of his parents.
But by 2003, as visitor numbers dwindled, the hotel’s now former owner struck a deal with the Government to turn it into a “transit camp”, housing asylum seekers for a reported £350 per person per week. The Nayland Rock, like Margate itself, became a dumping ground for society’s unwanted.
The rooms were turned into dormitories housing people for months at a time. Matters came to a tragic head one sunny Saturday morning here in August 2006, when a Congolese asylum seeker fell to his death from a fifth-floor window.
“You would get crowds of men hanging around outside the building and it could get quite intimidating,” says Carol. “I think obviously that put people off.”
The 68-year-old hotel manager has been here for the past 18 years and with her pink slippers and flowing skirts is every inch the seaside landlady (Wynn is her maiden name; after marrying and later divorcing an Egyptian man who worked at the hotel she changed it to Abou el-Khir). When we meet on a midweek morning, its 70-odd bedrooms are nearly all empty, and the coffee lounge instead taken up by her six-month-old granddaughter’s pram and Dilly, her long-haired chihuaha.
The hotel – which now once more only caters to tourists – is currently without a star to its name, but that, according to Carol, is about to change. As of last month it has been taken over by a mystery new owner who she is yet to meet. “They are intending to bring it up to a five-star standard,” she says.
Regeneration is now a well-worn theme all along Margate’s golden sands. The town that was once a byword for neglect is becoming one of the hippest in the country.
Margate’s rise encapsulates a renaissance of the Great British seaside – one the Telegraph is chronicling in a special series throughout this summer, beginning today. After years of postwar decay, the tide is turning.
Visitor numbers are up. The sharp fall in the pound, post-Brexit, is keeping more holidaymakers on home shores and in 2015, Britons made 19.4 million trips to the English coast, a 10 per cent increase on the previous year.
The Government has pledged to spend close to £200 million on coastal regeneration schemes by 2020. There are also calls for Theresa May to appoint a “seaside tsar” to better coordinate local authority spending. Margate is leading the revival. Figures released last month revealed that it has recorded a sharper rise in house prices over the past year than anywhere else on the coast, climbing 12.5 per cent to an average price of £202,276. Out-of-towners are snapping up its grand Edwardian terraces and commuting into London on the HS1 line (a journey of less than two hours). It has even earned itself a new nickname: “Shoreditch-on-Sea”.
Artists have led the vanguard of regeneration. In 2011, the Tate’s £17 million Turner Contemporary gallery opened in honour of the town’s most famous son. Last year, the attraction, which squats like a white cube overlooking the seaside promenade, received a record 352,204 visits. Numerous smaller galleries and cheap studios are also springing up.
On Broad Street in the old town, the Pie Factory Gallery occupies a once-empty former butcher’s and exhibits the work of local artists such as Helen Brooker.
“I have been here since I was 13 and I’m now 52,” she says. “The Eighties were a sad time. People started getting cheap flights abroad and the big hotels were diminished and turned into bedand-breakfasts. London councils used to put people here who they didn’t want. It became a transient population and that sense of community didn’t exist any more. People didn’t feel proud to be part of Margate.”
The “Shore ditchification” of Margate extends to a graffiti wall along the empty shops surrounding the Sixties-built tower block Arlington House, which dominates the skyline and is scorned as a brutalist eyesore by residents and visitors alike.
I stop and chat with a few teenagers rattling paint cans who complain that the town is still a “dump”. Behind the trendy facades, very real problems remain.
As recently as 2013, the Centre for Social Justice think tank released a report condemning the high levels of drug addiction, unemployment, teenage pregnancy and “severe social breakdown” along the coast. The report found the country was spending almost £2 billion in welfare payments to working-age adults in seaside towns – making particular reference to Margate, Clacton-on-Sea, Great Yarmouth and Blackpool.
This struggle to move on is encapsulated by the town’s 1920built Dreamland amusement park, which reopened in June 2015 following an £18 million restoration.
Its latest incarnation has installed the traditional rides: the helter skelter, ghost train and gleaming carousel, as well as Britain’s oldest wooden rollercoaster. But in its opening year, 50 per cent fewer visitors came than hoped for and on May 27 the administrators were called in. While the park remains open, admission is currently free.
“I hope that they manage to turn it around,” says Amanda Jones, who is visiting for the day from nearby Broadstairs with her four children aged between 10 and 15.
“The reality is, I’m not so sure. You don’t get people nowadays showing off that they are going to Margate for their holidays. There is still that rough element. I have told the kids not to get out their phones out while we’re here.”
On an albeit drizzly summer’s day, there are few queues for the rides and the food stalls are largely empty. Outside on the promenade, a gaggle of brightly dressed entertainers march about, trying to drag punters inside. Only the fortune teller, “Miranda of Margate”, seems to be doing a roaring trade.
Robert Ward, who is visiting with his wife Beryl and eight-year-old grandchildren, Jack and Emma, admits he is less than impressed with the new Dreamland.
“It is nice to see it open again and they are trying very hard, but they are still trying to recreate something that existed 25 years ago, rather than take it forward,” says Ward, who in his youth recalls coming to Margate on his Lambretta Li 150 for bank holiday beanos. “It is not always about reliving everything.”
The struggles of Dreamland – compared with the Turner over the road – lie in this attempt to revive a bygone era, rather than create a new one of its own. To truly change the fortunes of Margate and other towns of its ilk, instead of indulging nostalgia, perhaps we should take a hammer and chisel to it instead.
‘The Eighties were a sad time. People didn’t feel proud to be part of Margate’