Last Saturday I spent the day at the seaside in Margate with the Shabby Seaside Appreciation Society. The day didn't start off at its best — our excitement at getting one of the new fast-track Javelin trains at St. Pancras soon dwindled when we found ourselves an hour behind schedule due to "a death on the line at Wye" ("Is it a person or a cow?" asked Tyla). However, the gorgeous blue skies and the welcome party made up of people who'd got the slower train from Victoria meant our spirits were high as we piled out of the station and around the corner to an abandoned car park.
I mentioned the beautiful vaulted ceiling of Margate Station last time, but I can't resist posting another photograph of it, because it is so lovely.
The abandoned car park is attached to Margate's landmark towerblock, Arlington House, and looks over the abandoned Dreamland theme park, where fairground ghosts wait for their £3.7m resurrection. Whilst everyone else got out their DSLRs and had complicated conversations about f-stops and tripods, I was messing around with new photo apps on my iPhone.
(Last week, by coincidence, someone favourited my old picture of the station ceiling, so I had a browse through their other favourites and came across these great shots taken in 1963 when Arlington House was going up. Apparently it's due to be struck with what can only be termed "Noughty Cladding Syndrome" which I use to refer to the trend over the last decade for covering classic mid-to-late twentieth century concrete architecture in (usually awful and unsympathetic) cladding, a subject which I am sure Owen can rant about with more wit than I would. In fact, he probably already has.)
After a stroll along the seafront, a group of us headed off to the Shell Grotto, which I wrote about after my last visit there. I still think it's a wonderful, fantastic, bizarre place, but I got the impression that most of the others were indifferent and even bored by it. Well, boo, to them, they have no heart or soul. This time I got excited because I noticed that lots of shells had names and dates on them, some of them going back to the 1950s, and some going back even further nearer to the time the grotto was first discovered.
From there we wandered back down to the seafront to find fish and chips for lunch at Peter's Fish Factory, which comes recommended by us here at Mondo Towers. I had saithe, because I had never eaten it before, except it turned out to be the same thing as coley, which I have. With a generous portion of chips, plus mushy peas and a large and extremely juicy gherkin, it came to the princely sum total of three quid. Bargain. At that price I could have had seconds, if I could have managed to eat anything else after that.
At this point our small group split again, as some people wandered off down the seafront in search of a wrestling artist, whilst the rest of us had a stroll along the harbour wall and around the cliff to Lido Sands. The Harbour Wall seemed to have lost its pretty flags, but has gained a permanent bronze statue of one of Ann Carrington's lovely Shell Ladies, and we spotted a Thames estuary pilot ship chugging out to a large ship to guide it in to the shore.
We bumped into some more Flickr friends returning from Lido Sands, who told us to look out for the wrecked car being submerged by the incoming tide, and recommended a fine venue for tea (more on this later). More bizarre than the car wreck was the fact that it was the only place where there were any real waves to be seen; the rest of the time the sea was incredibly calm, with a slick glassy sheen and barely a ripple (as you can see in the photo at the end of this post).
Lido Sands was looking abandoned and neglected, but the shockingly red roofs of its car park led me to finding red in other places in the nearby vicinity.
On the road above, I found Bleak House (the real Bleak House is of course down the road in Broadstairs), and didn't realise as I took this photograph that one of its tenants was watching me from the window.
By this point, we were getting cold and thirsty, so we hied ourselves to the cafe recommended by our friends Steve and David, the inimitably eccentric Mad Hatters Tea Rooms, where we were warmly welcomed by the proprietor's sister, and had a lovely tea. My slice of homemade Victoria sponge cake was melt-in-the-mouth light, and our tea came with extra teabags in case it wasn't strong enough (presumably we could get extra hot water if we asked), and just look at the generous portions of cream and jam that came with the scone — none of your pre-wrapped-portions-which-are-never-quite-big-enough here:
The decor is quite something, too; loads of old framed photographs, various nick-nacks and sundries, including some which fit the inevitable Alice-In-Wonderland theme, but not as many as you'd think, although there's perhaps an overkill of tinsel, "because it's always Christmas somewhere," they told us. There's a fantastic Victorian toilet, which they are rightly proud of — as a lady (who I am assuming was the lady of the house) told me, not everyone had indoor plumbing in those days! She then went on to tell me about her great-grandfather (I think), who she claimed was the first white man to cultivate coffee in Kenya, and whose nearest neighbours were 100 miles away and all they had was a bicycle! Even if you take it with a pinch of salt, still a fantastic story, and a thoroughly recommended place to visit. (The Mad Hatters Tea Rooms, that is, not Kenya. I've never been to Kenya. Although I know people who liked it so much they decided to elope there, so it must have something going for it. Besides the coffee. Either that, or they really like coffee.)
And then we found the pub where Eric Morecambe held his wedding reception. I know this, because they have a blue plaque commemorating the fact. And again I got another surprise when I looked at the picture on my laptop, because I didn't realise I'd managed to include the bull's head in the frame:
After all of that, it was a disappointment to end the day in a horrible Lloyds No.1 pub, but that was where the others had all arranged to be, so that was where we went (and it did have a great name). Catching up with them, opinion on Margate's charms seemed to be widely divided and widely derided. Quite a few people dismissed it as grotty and horrible, which struck me as odd as that seemed to be their principle reason for wanting to visit in the first place — and for particularly wanting to visit off-season. Personally, I can find beauty and charm in lots of things that other people often overlook or dismiss as ugly and boring, but I'm not a big fan of taking a holiday in other peoples' misery (to paraphrase a famous song by an infamous band that a friend recently heard being played in Harrods of all places), and I get a bit annoyed with people who choose to spend a day visiting somewhere rundown and then complain and sneer that it's grim and boring.
I like Margate, though. I think it's been regrettably neglected in favour of the slightly posher charms of Broadstairs and Ramsgate up the coast (I remain ignorant as to why that is the case, given the proximity of the three towns, although I have one or two theories), and it's seen negative attitudes and neglect beget more negative attitudes and neglect, but if you look beyond the superficial tackiness of the place, you can find plenty of faded glamour and attractive detailing. One benefit of having been largely ignored is that many original architectural details haven't been ripped out as they have been in other places, and are all there to see if you pay attention.
