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Five years ago, some dilapidated public urinals in a park in Margate were sold at auction by the council to a private bidder for £11,000. The shabby little structure is barely visible from the path, a graffitied block hidden behind shrubs with weeds winding through the roof and floor. The original glazed urinals are exposed and crumbling. For half a decade, the former loos have languished.
“It’s the county’s strangest listed building,” says Margate local John Cripps. “Firstly it’s a toilet, and secondly it’s derelict. Why would you buy something and then just leave it?”
Welcome to the UK’s strangest town. Labelled one of the most deprived coastal regions in the country by the Office for National Statistics in 2010, Margate has since undergone a dramatic transformation, illustrated by the various new titles bestowed upon it: Shoreditch-by-Sea, Hackney Bay, Camden-by-Sea, and even the ‘polyamory capital of the UK’. In 2022, the Cliftonville area of Margate was named Time Out’s ‘Eighth coolest neighbourhood in the world’.
In a sign of the times, the urinals are finally being converted into – what else? – a coffee shop, a project that pledges to preserve the list-worthy decorative metal panels. It’s another win for the hipsters, who already stand accused of hijacking the coastal town.
Last month local punk band CRABS released a track entitled Make Margate Shit Again, cheekily bemoaning the town’s gentrification. Choice lines include:
I miss the days when Dreamland was shuttered / Bring back drunks face down in the gutter
And:
At least we could afford to pay the rent / Instead of heading to the beach and pitching a tent
And it’s not just locals who are mad: Margate’s transformation has irked the nation more than just about anywhere else. But why the vitriol? Academic Phil Hubbard, who wrote the book Borderlands, writes that Kent’s coast is often seen as an imagined battleground where our national myths are played out: our relationship with foreigners, our national identity, our values. If Margate is changing, what does it mean?
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“People get Margate so wrong,” Aly tells me. She says the independent bookshop where she works is essentially “Margate’s unofficial tourist board” and she spends hours discussing the place. The bookshop was opened in 2019 by a woman who moved to Margate from Mile End, making her a typical DFL – Down From Londoner – an acronym and identity with which all of Margate is familiar. That is to say: Hipsters (“I hate the H word,” hisses Aly). Margate seems to hold a romantic appeal for lost Londoners, she says. “People just kind of wash up here, in a coastal town. But when you come to a small place like this, you can’t escape yourself.”
The Margate Bookshop is a small Georgian building in the Market Square of the Old Town, which is the pinnacle of gentrified Margate. Queer, anti-colonial, translated and other modern books fill the shelves. A notice board advertises community events: life drawing classes, ‘breathwork’ sessions, a story club “championing diverse picture books” for children, pregnancy yoga and “Steph’s supper club” (£35pp, excluding drinks).
Originally from Canterbury, Aly moved here several years ago via East Dulwich. “It’s impossible to describe Margate without saying things like, edgy,” she says, wincing for comic effect. “Edgy” could in this case refer to the crime rate (one of the highest of any UK town, particularly for drugs and violent and sexual offences), the many boarded up shops on the high street or the dilapidated buildings. It does not apply to the bookshop, which is endearingly twee.
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“You can only afford to live in Margate now if you work remotely or if you’re a tradesperson or maybe if you own a local business,” Charlotte tells me over a late afternoon hot chocolate in Turkish bakery-diner Olimpia. She has lived here all her life and works for her dad’s company, which fixes lifts. Charlotte says her property, bought a few years ago, has gone up in value by more than £100,000. Over the last decade house prices in Margate have doubled, although they have plateaued in the last 12 months. People Charlotte went to school with have been priced out. How does she feel about it all?
“What, you mean the gentrification? I don’t mind it, really. It means there are new cocktail bars and places that are more my scene now. I go out and I’ll meet someone from New Zealand, or the Netherlands, and I’m like ‘Why would you want to come here!’ The roads feel less sketchy than when I was a child. I had a boyfriend who used to tell me to run if anyone approached us walking along Northdown Road in the evening.”
The artist Tracey Emin remembers Margate as a “no-go zone” in the 1980s, when she was raped in the town as a young girl. Now Northdown Road has some of the town’s trendiest spots, places like artisan bakery Oust. Close by, the Good Egg, a posh brunch spot stands next to THANET TASTY CHICKEN, which is in turn next to the Christian Book Centre. It looks a bit like Kingsland Road but with more methadone clinics and fewer Vietnamese restaurants.
Charlotte grew up in Margate in the 1990s and noughties, at the height of its erosion. Like many seaside towns, it has been on a ride. The OG seaside town, it became famous due to its accessibility by steamboat from London during the 17th and 18th century, when sea air and sea swimming were very much in vogue. The swanky swim-and-sun resort was home to the first roller coaster in the UK and the first donkey ride along the coast. In 1863, when the train station was commissioned, the town was full of boarding houses and swanky hotels.
But then: The Storm. All Margaters know about The Storm. It hit in 1953, destroying most of the beachside infrastructure. It is the reason Margate, unlike most British coastal towns, is missing a pier. It doesn’t even have a ruined one – it had fully disintegrated by 1998. The catastrophe, along with the dawn of cheap foreign package holidays, sent Margate to the bottom of the list of aspirational travel destinations.
Margate seems to hold a romantic appeal for lost Londoners. People just kind of wash up here, in a coastal town. But when you come to a small place like this, you can’t escape yourself.
Ironically, the weight of Margate’s past sometimes holds it back. Attempts to preserve its history – especially its listed buildings – have tended to “limit the growth of modern infrastructure and resulted in a lack of housing,” according to Gemma Collins, who wrote a recent paper comparing the fates of Margate and Glasgow.
This happened with Dreamland, the amusement park that was set to be converted to modern offices and flats in 1993. A year before work was due to begin, the Scenic Railway was designated a Grade II listed building. This marked the first time in history a ride was given listed status, halting the redevelopment. In this case the developers saved themselves some money: in 2008, an arsonist set it on fire.
Margate “hasn’t seen the support from the national government that big cities have,” according to former mayor Rob Yates. Indeed, the idea and funding for the town’s flagship attraction, the Turner Contemporary art gallery, was led by Kent County Council. The Turner opened in 2011, bringing arty tourists from London and further afield, and ever since Margate’s fortunes have changed. The Turner Gallery alone generated almost £68m for the local economy in 2019. A new, faster train line opened and DFLs flooded in. Gentrification took hold. TS Eliot’s bus shelter, where he wrote part of The Wasteland – On Margate Sands / I can connect nothing with nothing – was recently refurbished.
From 2011 to 2021, Margate had the highest rise in house prices of all the UK’s coastal towns. Yates, worried that local people couldn’t afford to stay in their homes, proposed letting limits and planning restrictions on Airbnbs, which many DFLs blame for the housing problems (rather than blaming themselves). Fortuitous cards have not been dealt evenly: Cliftonville West and Margate Central remain the most economically deprived neighbourhoods in Kent, and are within the most deprived 10 per cent in the UK.
Margate is also a place of political conflict. Thanet District Council was famously a UKIP heartland, although last year the town elected its first Labour MP in 20 years. A recent clash between left and right saw locals successfully block the removal of asylum seekers to the controversial Bibby Stockholm floating ‘processing centre’ in Portsmouth by lying in the road. The protest ultimately prompted the Home Office to rescind their decision to send 22 men, mostly from Afghanistan, to the barge.
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At an old morgue in the heart of Margate, I meet David, a chef at The Perfect Place To Grow. A humble man with large, kind eyes, he greets me outside the arched annexe; a Tracey Emin neon sign flickers behind us. He introduces me to the three youths in the kitchen that afternoon: Bradley, Bradley and Lyra, all wearing aprons and making meringues.
They are part of a project that aims to help NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training) get a foothold in the jobs market. David used to work in London as a chef but fell into poor mental health and spent time sleeping rough. He got help and trained to become a councillor.
You can tell Lyra’s a good cook. She’s obsessed with a £15,000 monster pressure cooker that can make 25 litres of spaghetti bolognese in one go. “I want one in my house one day!” Lyra’s dream is to open a bakery in Italy, so David helped get her a placement at an Italian bakery in town, with funding from Thanet Council.
“When we do an initial assessment, we ask potential trainees, ‘Do you feel part of your community?’ And most of them don’t even know what that means. They really don’t,” says David. Last summer, Emin invited the team at The Perfect Place to Grow down to the White Cube in Bermondsey – one of the chicest art galleries in London – to cater for the opening night of her new exhibition.
The Perfect Place to Grow is located between a new block of flats called Emin Court and TKE Studios (the Tracey K Emin artist studios). I knew she was a big presence, but I didn’t know quite how big. Emin presides over Margate like a feudal lord of the manor. If you sit in a (gentrified) cafe, the person sitting next to you may well turn out to be one of her proteges (this actually happened to me).
The creator of provocative and confessional artworks such as Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, You Keep Fucking Me and the infamous My Bed (literally her bed, after having spent a few days shagging, eating, drinking and sleeping in it), she is worth an estimated $15 million. As such, she can afford to do things like buy up an old gentlemen’s club on a whim in a bid to stop it being turned into a nightclub (it later transpired the roof was caving in).
She is also the patron of The Perfect Place to Grow, whose website reads: “None of this would be possible without our amazing friend,” under a large portrait of Emin, as if she were the town saint. After making her name in London, the artist moved back to Margate (from Shoreditch) in 2017 after suffering from cancer. She has become a diligent local campaigner and patron of the arts. The sea air is filled with gossip about her: “She owns 80 per cent of the property here,” speculates a musician, who wishes to remain anonymous (no one wants to be caught bad-mouthing Tracey).
One problem I encounter, as a temporary DFL, is that if you’re a late night drinker, Margate’s pubs and bars close early (even earlier than London). Or, if it’s a Wednesday, they are likely not open at all. So it is not by choice that I end up at Lido Pool Bar at the edge of the town, by the sea. It sells Kit Kats and Neck Oil with suspiciously printed-out and laminated labels. A game of pool costs 50p. It is a real mix of DFLs and Margate lifers, groups that otherwise tend to operate in silos. It’s also extremely weird: indescribable scenes are plastered over the walls: howling demons, smug flat-capped men, and what looks like… uh, the Louvre? If you look up close, the images are heavily pixellated. “The Sistine Chapel!” my new friends cry. “We love it!” They argue over whether the wallpaper has changed recently. “It’s not wallpaper, it’s art,” says the owner Neville.
Around the corner in a spacious room near the Old Town, Danny Romeril, a man with mutton chops and a green cap, is holding an exhibition. Originally from Jersey, he and his partner moved from Camberwell to Margate to buy a property a couple of years ago. It was during Covid that they got the idea. More space, the sea. He doesn’t miss London. The exhibition – an odd combination of sketches, small sculptures and grand oil paintings – is called Jumble.
Romeril loves it here. “If you like bad weather, this is the perfect place,” he grins, describing the regular 40 mile an hour winds with genuine affection. He doesn’t think Margate’s problems – a rental crisis, gentrification, deprivation – are Margate’s alone; in fact they are Britain’s problems. But if you get the media calling Margate the eighth coolest neighbourhood in the world, he says, then of course you’ll create some false expectations.
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To jumble is a process of mixing things up in a disordered way, according to Romeril’s display notes. Is Margate a jumble? In a way yes, but it’s also carefully ordered and socially coded to prevent jumbling. Certain cafes are for certain people. Curve, for example, sells kimchi cheese toasties for £10, as well as ground coffee and various merch, all reading ‘Curve’, as if the place you buy a latte describes your whole personality. Which, in a way, it does.
People who go to Curve do not go to Charlie’s, a seafront restaurant that currently has a 50% OFF ALL FOOD offer advertised in the window. If you walk up from the Old Town, the slant of the windows has the unfortunate effect of squeezing the letters together so that it reads: 50% OFFAL. Nor do they go to The ODDS Club, which I’m told has a tendency to turn away the DFL crowd.
It’s at Curve I meet Ryan, a pub manager and novelist in his forties who hails from the Outer Hebrides. He tells me he’s a “walking cliche”: he and his partner moved here from Hackney after Covid. He, too, thinks The Media gets Margate wrong. “A lot of Old Town is owned by people who bought here in the 1980s for nothing, people who don’t even live here. It’s too easy to blame incomers [for rental increases]. It’s the landlords who are to blame. People often call it Hackney-Meets-Sea, or Shoreditch-by-Sea, which is so lazy, you know? All healthy communities should have art galleries, community spaces and places where people go to share ideas and enjoy culture.”
Ryan says that by spending his money in local restaurants, venues and shops, and working in Margate (in his case as the general manager of The George and Heart pub), he is participating in a circular economy. It reminds me of Aly’s observation that Margate attracts people who are looking for community while also running away from something.
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Arlington House, a gigantic brutalist tower block in the centre of town, divides the people of Margate. You can’t miss it: it’s a vast monument to 1970s excess, entirely out of character with the rest of the town but not without its modernist charms. Whichever way you lean, it has the slightly sinister energy of a neolithic obelisk. From outside, it appears deserted. The only indicators of life are little details like an anti-Putin banner on a mid-floor window, and even that looks washed out and faded. Crisp packets blow in the blustery Margate wind across its wide, empty paths. It’s an unlikely totem for a small-town rebellion.
But one night last November, a Thanet District Council planning meeting erupted into cheers over Arlington House. Councillors had just voted unanimously against a recommendation to replace its windows. A campaign headed by – of course – Tracey Emin had won. “If Arlington House had been in London or any major city, it would have been protected and listed as an outstanding building,” she said last year.
The leaseholder had planned to replace the windows, which “rattle and shake”, with a new design. Artsy folk, architectural charities like the C20 Society and flat owners including Emin, protested. The windows had been specifically designed to give each flat both a sea and inland view, they argued. They are part of Margate’s heritage. Some residents fought back, citing the staggering energy bills they accrue due to the single glazing.
The aesthetic of the flats within Arlington House change drastically from floor to floor. On one it might be run-down and deprived, while another will be full of freshly decorated units complete with mid-century furniture and all the trappings of middle-class life. A local historian is said to have decorated their flat in period 1960s style. In a way, Arlington House is reflective of Margate as a whole: gentrified and falling down, a vision of both the past and the future, an extreme example of Britain’s deepening inequalities.
