Margate was one of those seaside towns that gained popularity in the Victorian era with the invention of the railways. Which with the advent of cheap air travel declined in popularity as we all flew off to places that were deemed to have more guarantee of giving us our annual holiday in the sun. It has a nice sandy beach in contrast to Brighton’s pebbles, which on the day we visited wasn’t overflowing with people but was still reasonably busy.

With the arrival of the Turner Contemporary art gallery at one end of the harbour and Dreamland aiming to reopen at Easter 2015[1], Margate feels like it is in transition. While it still has its share of hotels tend to bedsits and hostels there does seem to be an air of gentrification about the place, with people we spoke to feeling like places now slowly changing and has done since the Turner contemporary art gallery opened two years ago.

While it is encouraging that there are signs of gentrification and renewal, which will ultimately lead to jobs and opportunities for locals within Margate and the surrounding area. When we were talking with locals about Margate its history, problems and opportunities most of them seemed to feel that the town was being used as a dumping ground for London councils unable to afford the house residents within London and shipping out people on benefits to places that had lower costs for housing what are frequently becoming redundant populations in modern Britain’s neoliberal economic agenda.

The Daily Mail in an article from December 2012[4] initially starts discussing T. S. Eliot and then describes how it feels like it could be East Germany but with windfarms, which while it denigrates them I found them personally rather quite interesting and incredibly modern a visual reminder of what we must do if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change in our lifetimes but that’s a story for a different day.

We saw lots of diversity in both ethnicity and economic power, we also saw lots of boarded-up shops and at the same time places that looked like they had been there forever and newer trendier looking galleries and cafes things are changing and yet the social problems that have been caused by the underlying economic trends within the area remain.