Art and murder in Margate: how Eliot, Turner and Emin put one town back on the map

On Margate Sands/I can connect/Nothing with nothing

It might not get you racing to Margate – and TS Eliot was recovering from a mental breakdown when he wrote it, in a beach shelter, overlooking the sea. But the lines went on to become part of The Waste Land, one of the 20th century’s most famous poems.

Not that Margate cared what he thought. It had been rocking since the 1800s, a Victorian seaside getaway that gave the world its first beach deckchairs, donkey rides, and those spectacular Thanet skies, described by the artist JMW Turner as the “loveliest in all Europe”.

That magnificent sky dwarfs the landscape as we step out from the station on a gloriously sunny day and walk towards Dreamland. Once the exotic “Hall by the Sea” – containing 19th-century fairground rides and a menagerie with lions and elephants – it was owned by the flamboyant circus maestro “Lord” George Sanger. It became Dreamland in 1929, complete with what was then a novelty: a roller coaster.

But “Lord” George was murdered with a hatchet, the roller coaster caught fire twice, and by the time Dreamland closed its doors in the early 2000s, so too had much of the town’s business. Cheap foreign flights had turned Margate itself, with its boarded-up buildings, into a wasteland.

Art, say the locals, has saved it.

I stand looking out to sea in the light-filled foyer of the Turner Contemporary, and read that, in the 10 years since the gallery opened, it has exhibited more than 500 artists, attracted 3.3 million visits, contributed £70m to the local economy, and established Margate as a creative hub. Those boarded-up shops? Now independent galleries and vintage boutiques.

I wander around the exhibitions, all running until September: a thought-provoking show on the nature of tourism, featuring Kent-born New York-based Ellen Harvey, alongside works by enthusiastic Margate tourist Turner; large Barbara Walker portraits depicting members of the African diaspora living locally; a Steve McQueen video installation set in the Caribbean; and a special 10-year celebration show created with Margate’s primary-school children.

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Afterwards I stroll back to Eliot’s Nayland Rock shelter on the seafront to see the new sculpture by Michael Rakowitz, which takes its name, April is the cruellest month, from The Waste Land. A stark figure of a soldier, cast with concrete from Basra and Margate chalk, turns its back on the sea. Modelled on a friend of the artist who served with the royal artillery in Iraq in 2003, it’s part of England’s Creative Coast series, which consists of seven art installations along the southeast seafront inspired by land and sea borders.

“The Turner definitely kick-started Margate’s rejuvenation,” Eli Thompson, owner of Olby’s Soul Cafe, tells me. We get chatting on the footpath outside as I’m browsing the menu (their jerk-spice-infused Sunday roast has been voted the second best in Kent), and before I know it, I’m downstairs in the building’s cavernous basement, getting an impromptu tour of the bar’s latest facilities.

Eli wasn’t a man taking it easy during lockdown. On a pandemic-enforced break from running Margate’s three major music festivals – Soul, Jazz and Ska – he set up Olby’s Creative Hub, the recording studios and video suites broadcasting Olby’s TV and Thanet Local Radio, available now to community groups, local artists, and for training the next generation.

The quirky tourist information office in Droit House on the pier is a good place to start your visit. Built as the Customs House in 1928, it was redesigned by architect William Edmunds before being destroyed in the Second World War, and was later rebuilt to the original plan. It now has a Tracey Emin artwork above the door.

The architect died in Peckham House lunatic asylum, and his daughter, Christiana Edmunds, became the notorious Brighton poisoner, ending her days in Broadmoor. On the “Murky Margate” walking tour, we stand outside the Hawley Square house she was born in and hear how she injected strychnine into chocolates so she could distribute them to unsuspecting Brightonites.

It turns out that even the Turner has a connection with murder. Built on the site of Sophia Booth’s guesthouse, where Turner stayed on his early trips to the town, it later became the site of the Metropole Hotel, where Sidney Harry Fox murdered his mother Rosaline to cash in her life insurance. He was subsequently hanged.

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I can’t find any records of murder in the Walpole Hotel, where we’re staying, but there sure is a lot of art. Guests have taken to recording memories of their visit on the hotel’s linen napkins, and a whole array of watercolours, oils, drawings, photographs and poems line the walls of the dining room. The foyer and corridors upstairs are packed with memorabilia, all belonging to the Budge family, who built the hotel in 1914 and ran it until 1989.

Buying it was a passion project for current owners Jane and Peter Bishop, who fell in love with the clifftop building back in the 1960s. They had no experience running hotels – nor the money to buy it – but, inspired by their adulation, the Budges gave them the hotel free of charge for the first five years so that they could make enough money for a mortgage.

Tracey Emin is a big fan of the Walpole and has sketched two napkins for them. She’s also used 20 of the hotel’s embroidered sheets in her art projects. I’m lucky enough to spend the night in the four-poster bed that featured in her GQ magazine photoshoot (and later in quite a racy party, apparently).

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There are a lot of passionate people in Margate – like Simon and Nadine Morriss, who run the Buoy and Oyster, with spectacular sunset views from the restaurant balcony as you eat your dinner. They spent lockdown turning the downstairs area into a takeaway fish and chip shop called Beach Buoys.

Or Ned, Bertie and Chase, who are planning to open the UK’s first crab museum on Broad St to tell the story of this often-overlooked crustacean and its important impact on our lives. The project aims to weave history, anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental science and philosophy into one gigantic story.

We have one last meal before we leave – fish and chips on the beach from Peter’s Fish Factory, the queues outside backing up the claim that it’s the best in town. We take a final stroll through the Old Kent Market, with its eclectic food stalls and double-decker-bus burger stand. We down a farewell drink in the Bull’s Head, where the landlady comes out to give us a history of the area alongside our pints, pointing to the upstairs room where Eric Morecambe had his wedding reception in 1952 when he married the landlord’s daughter.

There aren’t so many murders in Margate these days, but Dreamland is back up and running, with its roller coaster – now one of the oldest in the world. And with Emin planning to return to her Margate roots – she’s setting up a residential studio in the former Thanet Press building – art is well and truly putting the town on the map again.

And it still has those wonderful skies.

Travel to Margate from London with Southeastern from £40.30 for a weekend return.

Doubles at The Walpole from £105, B&B.