Margate is famous for two artists, J M W Turner and Tracy Emin, and one poet, T S Eliot. We have been there to see an exhibition based on Eliot’s The Wasteland in the new Turner Gallery, which was developed at last in part at the prompting of Emin. We were intrigued to know the state of Margate: is it an impoverished, decaying, sink seaside town full of junkies, or a town on the up, following in the footsteps of gentrified Whitstable?
The answer is that it’s on a journey from sink town to something close to posh. The journey was started by the plan to create the gallery, which opened in 2011 on the site where Turner boarded when he visited Margate. A woman in a gallery on the harbour selling her husband’s paintings by the square inch told us that the town had reached its nadir 10 years ago. Now there are houses bought by Londoners that cost a million pounds each. “Mind you,” she said, “You need to spend as much on restoration as you spend on buying the house. But there are some lovely houses: bow windows, balconies, tall windows to the floor. And there are some lovely squares. Walk up that way and take a look.”
Turner strayed in Margate when it was primarily a fishing port. The tourism came later when the trains arrived. Eliot was there in the early part of the 20th century when tourism was at its peak. Turner, Eliot, and holidaymakers were all attracted by the huge sandy beach, where the tide comes up close to the town and then retreats way out to sea. Turner loved the light, and Eliot wrote:
On Margate sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
I wondered too if Margate had inspired lines in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled. (As my grandfather did when he went to the beach at Bognor. He would never put on swimming trunks.)
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dear to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
I walked on the wide, empty sands this morning and chanted those lines repeatedly. Our hotel, the Sands Hotel, looked out onto the beach. It’s an example of the renaissance of Margate in that it was a first class hotel in the 19th and early 20th century, declined badly, and has now been well restored. We paid £30 extra for a sea view, and Lin took a picture of me in the sands that I think of as the definitive portrait of me.
I reread The Wasteland for perhaps the 20th time as we travelled on the train to Margate, and I read some of it to Lin in the hotel. The exhibition was enjoyable, and Margate seemed an apt place to celebrate the poem, not only because of the mention of Margate and Eliot having written some if the poem while in the town but also because of the town’s wartime connections and because some of it is a wasteland. I’ve tried to capture some of that in a “picture poem.”
One thing I felt sure about is that Margate would be a place to get some whelks, and I was right. They were delicious whelks, top notch.
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