Margate is different: though it too has declined as a destination for family holidays or day trips on the train from London, it cannot really be said to have come down in the world. On my first visit, several years ago, I expected a quaint tourist trap at the coastal extremity of ‘1066 country’, and I was alarmed to discover so many people with things wrong with them: a glum fraternity of the lame, blind and indeterminately afflicted, all lined up on a rainswept esplanade. And then there is Hastings, the deadest of dead towns, economically stranded without an arterial road, seemingly abandoned to crime and dereliction.
At Ramsgate and Dover, Edwardian mansions still sell for remarkably low prices, and the towns’ grand hotels, in common with many on this coast, have been turned into housing for social welfare recipients and refugees – a disastrous policy: cramming the most vulnerable together in the most highly visible buildings on the sea front. Its long promenade is now a scratted mess of car parks, amusement arcades, botched amenities and ugly monuments. There is Herne Bay, which once boasted the longest pier in Britain (a sketchy remnant still sits in the bay, amputated by a storm in 1978) and attracted, in its heyday, the genteelest of visitors. This stretch of the south-east coast is dotted with towns that succumbed, in the course of half a century or so, to changing fashions and altered economic expectations. Where some English coastal resorts (Blackpool, for example) have managed to retain their place in the nation’s affections, and seem forever frozen in the sepia tones of the start of the last century, Margate has the once-lurid tonal range of a yellowing Polaroid: the last snapshot, perhaps, before foreign holidays became a real option. ‘Margate’, writes Tracey Emin in her new memoir, Strangeland, is ‘the nub of the Isle of Thanet, thrusting like a bent forefinger from the crazed knuckle of England.’ The Kentish seaside town has long been infra dig and out of style it stands for a certain sort of garish fun that faded to nostalgia decades ago.
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