Tour of the South East: Margate

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

After Canterbury we drove to Margate. I was looking forward to seeing Margate: it is the destination of the celebrated ‘jolly boys’ outing’ in the 1989 Christmas special of Only Fools and Horses, and—in my memory at least—seemed synonymous with merriment and high jinks.

Oh, but how wrong can a person be.


I was half-right, anyway: it was the town which served as the setting for the middle part of that famous Christmas feature-length outing for the Trotter brothers. But as for the merriment and high jinks, oh no. Oh no no no no no no no.

When you arrive in Margate you realise how run-down it is. That’s pretty much the first impression you arrive at. We drove along the seafront, desperately looking for somewhere to stop for the evening. We hadn’t eaten since Burger King, and that had been way back, before Canterbury Cathedral and even before St. Augustine’s Abbey. I wanted my fish and chips, at any cost. After ten minutes of driving along the marine parade, we found a parking sign and followed it to what appeared to be the most ill-designed row of car-parking spaces ever witnessed in Christendom. On a spot of land jutting out into the sea (which looked fine, by the way: the general shittiness of Margate could not diminish the loveliness of the waters that sloshed at its coast), a row of cars sat. Behind them was a stretch of ground leaving just enough room for the cars to reverse and drive off—and also enough room for the cars to reverse a little too zealously, and go dropping into the sea some ten feet below. Nobody else saw much of a problem with this, evidently; but we did, and decided to search for somewhere less waterborne at which to park up. As we left, we noticed a row of beach huts at the other end of the car park, and a sign which designated these as private parking spaces. Christ, I remember thinking. Somebody actually pays for this.

We kept looking, but it wasn’t easy to find anywhere, largely because, despite the lateness of the day and the general uninhabitability of the place, all the car parks seemed to be full to capacity. After some searching up various back-streets, we managed to find a car park that was, to our surprise, virtually empty. The only other inhabitants were a car with its driver’s door dented (as if by a wrecking ball), and several piles of smashed glass, which had presumably come into being when the wrecking ball had last swung through this way. As we headed over to the pay-and-display machine to deposit a sum, a group of rowdy teenagers passed through the car park, lending the place a further edge of classiness matched only by a Romford or Chatham. Apparently, since the decline in the town’s fortunes—caused by the rise in the number of tourists choosing holidays abroad or further along the coast—Margate has acquired a rather serious unemployment problem. It must be tough for young people, with no local college or university and not many job prospects in their hometown other than scooping ice cream into cones and scooping chips into bags. Now, thanks to the dropping off of tourism, they don’t even have those dizzy career heights to scale.

Returning our attention to the parking meter, we realised that none of our coins seemed to be having any effect on the machine. It was broken. And yet nobody was parking here. Hmm, we though. We shrugged our shoulders and left the car, at our peril.

It was a lovely evening to be strolling along a sea-front, taking in the bacterial seaweed smell of the ocean and the sound of the gulls’ cries. I tried to focus on the senses of smell and hearing because there wasn’t much to feed the sense of sight. Margate is known to many, from the days of the Cinque Ports, as the ‘limb’ of Dover, but several other body parts readily spring to mind too. A Victorian pier once stood on the coast there, but it was destroyed in 1978 in a violent storm. The air was calm tonight, and the sun warm on our faces, but even the favourable weather didn’t do much for the place.

A massive and incredibly ugly tower block stands right near the sea-front, built in that horrendously uncomely 1970s style that so many council flats are. I’d love to know which architect was responsible for these buildings. They litter the outskirts of London, so when you arrive in, say, North London on the train from Buckinghamshire or Northamptonshire or practically anywhere else, you notice a sharp and uncomfortable decline in the appearance of the houses. I know that virtually everything about the seventies which once appealed now strikes us as simply absurd: flared trousers, long floppy hair, anorexic women, the Bay City Rollers. But all of these can at least be understood in context to have held some vague sense of appeal, once. But this style of architecture is just baffling, because it is ugly and has always been ugly, and nowhere at any point in the future will it be anything other than horrific. Soot-grey and with horrid angles, this building would have lowered the tone of Margate had it been a glistening Shangri-La with stunning sea views. The fact that it still managed to lower the tone amongst the indifferent buildings which surrounded it is a testament to its awfulness.

It’s called Arlington House and its claim to fame, apart from being among the greatest—or worst, depending on how you look at it—eyesores of the country, is that it is mentioned in the Madness song, ‘One Better Day’: ‘Arlington house, address: no fixed abode’. If I lived there I wouldn’t want to admit it either.

In front of the tower block stands Dreamland, the old amusement park where Victor and Margaret Meldrew had their third anniversary in One Foot in the Grave. Say what you like about Margate, but the place has a rich comedic heritage. The place must’ve been there for years; whatever its past, the makers of our atlas seemed to think it worth a mention on the map, and it’s the only place in Margate worthy of historic mention, it would seem. It was all shut up but it was hard to tell whether that was because it was the evening or because it has simply lain that way for years. It wasn’t boarded up as such; but I wouldn’t have been surprised if no one had set foot inside for twenty years. A bit of research on the internet teaches me that the place is currently closed to the public, but is being redeveloped as an historic amusement park; it contains what appears to be the first rollercoaster in the United Kingdom, which I suppose is a claim to fame, albeit not a particularly ambitious one.

Whatever the historical significance of the Dreamland theme park, the whole town is still, it has to be said, seriously washed up and run down. After strolling along the promenade for a bit, we found what appeared to be a Wetherspoons. We toyed with going in and having a drink, but couldn’t face the prospect. What on earth would we find if we stepped inside? The pub had the admittedly rather interesting name of ‘The Mechanical Elephant’, but for all we knew the place might’ve been splattered from floor to ceiling in mechanical elephant dung. So we found a small and rather indifferent chip shop further along, had distinctly mediocre sausage and chips on the beach, fed the remains to some gulls, and left.

When we got back to the car after our tea, it was to find a car next to ours, full of angry-looking young men with shaved heads. Christ, I thought we were for it. When we got in the car and started up the engine, they did the same. Were we going to be harried along the Isle of Thanet halfway back to Canterbury, and be forced off the road where we would be ritually sacrificed and our skins put on by our vanquishers? The thought didn’t bear thinking about. As it was, they drove away when we did, and the evening passed without further incident.