LOST Margate

An exhibition inspired by a collection of poetry, which features international artists alongside some unlikely historic artefacts, will explore the impact of waves of incomers on the North Kent town of Margate.

Where The Land Forgets Itself was written by Connor Sansby, a poet and performer born in Margate, who grew up there before the town’s current arts-led reinvention. Published in 2025, Where The Land Forgets Itself explores the idea that, as the town has been ashamed of itself for so long, it didn’t tell its own story. That left a blank space for newcomers to fill with their own narrative.

It’s not a big step away from the ideas Jonathan Meades explored in the 1990 BBC documentary In Search Of Bohemia, about another seaside town, Hastings, which he described as “a series of abandoned works which attempt to occupy the same canvas.” Meades said, “perhaps all places are ideas to those who don’t live there.”

Sansby is now working with artist-curator Dan Thompson and museum designer Kate Kneale on a week-long exhibition titled Lost Margate, which happens in the first week of February. Rather than a straightforward exhibition about gentrification, Thompson has taken the idea that different waves of people who’ve arrived in the town mourn a different version of the town, as it is constantly rewritten by newer arrivals – a process Sansby compares to the tide washing in and out.

None of them question that Margate needed regeneration, or even – to some degree – the gentrification that inevitably followed. Margate was evacuated and then heavily bombed during the Second World War, saw little investment in the latter half of the twentieth century in comparison to other seaside towns, and by the early-2000s was in dire condition. It has had poverty fueled by seasonal employment since the 1880s, when Karl Marx was sent to the town to have his boils treated and noted that “Margate lives only upon the Londoners, who regularly inundate it at the bathing season. During the other months it vegetates only.” The earliest attempts at solving the problem happened in the 1920s, when new industry was encouraged to the area as the Kent Coalfields expanded.

But after lots of failed starts, around 2010, the town was finally turned around by three major investments – in building the landmark Turner Contemporary gallery, in the restoration of the nearby Old Town, and by the dramatic creation of a new public space on the beach as part of flood defence works. Together, the three gave the town an over-arching narrative as a place of sea and sky, a natural beauty that inspired generations of artists and writers.

However, despite the town’s current success it still has poverty, and an older generation still miss the town of their youth – Kiss Me Quick hats, seaside amusements and the Bembom Brothers theme park, cheap bars and unlicensed nightclubs, and the waves of Mods, Rockers, and later Skinheads who brought youth culture to the town.

Lost Margate will attempt to weave all those different stories together, with a series of prints from New York-based Ellen Harvey’s The Disappointed Tourist (the originals are currently on show at Chicago Architecture Center), contact sheets from a 1990s photographic survey by French photographer Gérard Uféras, and artefacts like Patrick Abercrombie’s 1920s regeneration plans for East Kent, a collection of seaside ceramic souvenirs from Stoke-on-Trent’s Goss factory, and a stool made of wood from the listed 1921 Scenic Railway rollercoaster. The trio even chose a venue to contribute to the conversation: the pop up exhibition happens in a former pie factory in Margate’s Old Town.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of events – including a talk on Margate’s Lost Cinemas by Corinna Dowling, owner of the independent Palace Cinema, a history walk by Dan Thompson, and workshops.