February in blowy Margate, and I enjoyed the seafront like a convalescing Victorian, drank coffee at the new Cafe Louie on Sea at the Turner Contemporary, savoured a dreamy sunset and wondered why I didn’t come here more often.
Margate’s demographic and its food scene may have shifted a fair bit over the past decade, but this Kentish seaside town will never be like gorgeous but airy-fairy Aldeburgh or Southwold. Yes, modern Margate is far prettier than it used to be, but it will never be prettified to that hyper-real state that happens when seaside towns go posh and end up finding themselves swimming in £7 sausage rolls, with the locals all sold up and the newcomers working on watercolour exhibitions. Modern Margate is certainly a bit “let’s go to see the new Tracey Emin, then pop by Angela’s for a small plate of turbot head brawn with pickles”, but it’s also still very much Chas Hodges rhyming “buckets and spades and cossies and all” with “fill of jellied eels at the cockle stall”, and if you come here to “summer” in 2024, there will still be a brutalist 1960s tower block overlooking the beach.
