How the English seaside town of Margate became an art magnet

The Kent resort of Margate is on the windward side of the North Sea, and when the sun shines on its flat, horseshoe beach, the light diffusing the moist air has a diaphanous quality, as if the town above is somehow hovering over a nebulous abyss. Artists have been drawn to this mysterious peninsula ever since J.M.W. Turner painted its limitless skies.

For almost two centuries, Margate was the summer playground of industrial Britain. Poets such as John Keats found inspiration in its radial streets. Charles Dickens made day trips from Broadstairs, and T.S. Eliot kicked about its broad, sandy shoreline, while the painters George Morland and Walter Sickert shared its golden light with holidaymakers from London, who hoped to wash off the soot and grime of the city in the sea’s wrinkled waves.

When the poet John Betjeman was searching for a picture of an everlasting England during the Second World War, he settled on Margate, writing of its putting greens and boarding houses, dance halls and fairy lights: ‘From third floor and fourth floor the children looked down / Upon ribbons of light in the salt-scented town; / And drowning the trams roared the sound of the sea / As it washed in the shingle the scraps of their tea.’

However, by the mid-1970s, Margate’s glories were behind it. Cheap package holidays to overseas resorts and the decimation of local industries had plunged the area into critical decline. Denuded of tourists and blighted by high unemployment, Margate was little more than a dead zone. In her autobiography, Strangeland, the artist Tracey Emin described it as a place where ‘there was nothing to do but blend in with the general decay’.

Then, in the early 2000s, after years of neglect, Margate became a test case for cultural regeneration. Could a town’s fortunes be turned around through investment in art? Plans for a new contemporary art gallery on the edge of the sea were put forward as part of the Labour government’s ‘Renaissance for the Regions’ initiative. In 2011, Turner Contemporary opened: a gleaming, boxy structure designed by the architect David Chipperfield, with windows that opened onto a horizonless expanse of sea and sky.

Since its inauguration, the gallery has welcomed more than four million visitors and contributed some £80 million to the Kent economy. Early suspicions that it would only be patronised by Londoners proved unfounded, with crowds of locals flocking in. Its success lies in never underestimating its audience, as the current exhibition testifies: Resistance, curated by the artist Steve McQueen, charts the documentation of British protest, from the Suffragettes in 1903 to the march against the Iraq War in 2003. Each photograph is printed in black and white, and all are presented in the same format, so that no one image is privileged above another, offering an intense exploration of community struggles over the past century.

An upcoming exhibition by the Egyptian-Canadian artist Anna Boghiguian promises to be equally thought-provoking. The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, from 14 June to 26 October, will explore how social and political upheavals are tied up with maritime history — a particularly apt theme in this setting.

Turner Contemporary, which is jokingly referred to in Margate as the ‘mother ship’, has acted as a gentrification blast for the local area. Coffee shops, restaurants and new boutique hotels have sprung up, and a Victorian funfair, Dreamland — with its Grade II-listed cinema and menagerie cages — has been restored. All this has resulted in a certain civic pride. However, with gentrification come rising house prices and expensive cappuccinos, and for some there is a sense that locals are being left behind. Poverty is still higher here than in other parts of Kent.

In 2019, Turner Contemporary’s then director, Victoria Pomery, told the BBC that those who were born in the town and had made their money elsewhere needed to come back, ‘because if we can’t champion the place we come from, how can other people?’

In stepped Dame Tracey Emin. The artist, who rose to fame in the mid-1990s as one of the collector Charles Saatchi’s YBAs (Young British Artists), has often used Margate as her anti-hero. Works such as Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) and Mad Tracey From Margate. Everyone’s Been There (1997) reference her difficult childhood in the town. ‘I grew up here, it’s part of me, it’s part of my DNA, its part of my thoughts,’ she said in 2021, soon after she had acquired an old Victorian bathhouse there.

The building is now TKE Studios, offering affordable, below-average rents for professional artists. It forms part of the Tracey Emin Foundation, which also runs TEAR, a free, studio-based art-school programme. The project is more than two years old, and the results speak for themselves. Many of the artists who have benefited from TEAR and those who are residents of the studios are now rising stars, such as Laura Footes, Vanessa Raw and Bianca Raffaella, the visually impaired artist who recently exhibited her ethereal canvases at Flowers Gallery. Raffaella has described TKE Studios as ‘transformative’, while Raw has often cited Margate and its artists as an inspiration.

Raw and Footes have exhibited at the Carl Freedman Gallery, which is housed in an old printworks in the town, and another former TEAR participant, Lola Stong-Brett, has a solo show opening there at the end of June. The gallery is owned by Emin’s friend and sometime collaborator Carl Freedman, who also runs the printmaking business Counter Editions. The space recently staged the well-received group show Gate of Horns: Myths of Resistance, Symbols of Defiance, curated by Hettie Judah. One of the exhibiting artists, Tamsin Morse, considers Margate a place of pilgrimage. ‘Coming off the train and walking into the light, I know why my grandmother looked forward to coming here every year for her holidays. There’s so much beauty, art and golden sand,’ she says.

There are other green shoots, too. The Margate Creative Land Trust, set up to support creative businesses and artists priced out of the property market, recently acquired a large building on Harold Road, which will be transformed into workshops and studio space. And there are hopes for the much-loved but faded music venue, the Winter Gardens, which has been closed since 2022. Last year, the council allocated £4 million of funding to the building in the hope of attracting new management, and there are positive signs that this will be successful.

Emin considers her journey to have come full circle. ‘Some people think I haven’t gone very far, but I have,’ she says. ‘I’ve gone all the way round the world in all directions and back again, and this [Margate] is what I’ve chosen.’

Christie’s Fund for the Arts is pledging its support for the Tracey Emin Artist Residency programme with a four-year funding commitment to provide art materials for all participating students. Learn more about Christie’s Fund for the Arts