I can connect / Nothing with nothing’ – was apparently composed in a small shelter facing out towards the beach and a long iron pier known as the Jetty, at the end of which stood a concert hall, bandstand and other attractions.
Both of them were mentally frail, but Vivien, apparently cheered by the vigour of the neighbouring resort, wrote: ‘Margate is rather queer, and we don’t dislike it.’ Her husband’s more celebrated and unsettled response, in The Waste Land – ‘On Margate Sands. Eliot and his wife stayed in the autumn of 1921.
(Karl Marx, convalescing at Margate in the spring of 1866, was displeased to observe, in the dining room of the King’s Arms inn, a fellow guest warming his bare feet by the fire the unfortunate author was then served ‘a rump steak, which seemed, in its natural state, to have belonged to a deceased cow’.) It was at Cliftonville that T.S. It was so successful, in fact, that in the middle of the nineteenth century an alternative resort was developed to the east, at Cliftonville, to cater for wealthier guests who thought themselves too fastidious for the Margate throng.
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Ease of access from London (by water, and later by rail) made it an obvious destination for the city’s working class, newly allotted a modicum of free time.
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As early as 1763, the poet William Cowper wrote of his stay there: ‘Margate tho’ full of Company, was generally fill’d with such Company, as people who were Nice in the choice of their Company, were rather fearful of keeping Company with.’ Margate was the country’s first popular bathing resort. Margate was never respectable to begin with. 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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