'On Margate sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.' T. S. Eliot wrote those lines on the bench of a beach shelter in Cliftonville, recovering from a nervous breakdown in October 1921, and they became part of The Waste Land. Three-quarters of a century earlier, J. M. W. Turner had told friends that the skies above Thanet were the loveliest in all of Europe, and painted them dozens of times - the long flat estuary horizon producing colour that nothing inland could match. The town between those two artistic visits is a place that has been a Cinque Ports harbour since the 15th century, a leading seaside resort for at least 250 years, a battleground for mods and rockers in the 1960s, a backdrop for Peaky Blinders, and the home of an underground temple covered in 4.6 million seashells whose age and purpose no one can quite agree on.
The name Margate was recorded as Meregate in 1264 and as Margate in 1299. The most likely etymology refers to a pool gate or gap in the chalk cliff where pools of water collected - a place where, perhaps, swimmers could jump in. The cliffs themselves are made of chalk, full of fossils. Margate appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 within the hundred of Thanet. It became a 'limb' of Dover in the Cinque Ports confederation during the 15th century, which made it formally part of the medieval network of southern English ports responsible for naval defence. The Battle of Margate - 24 March 1387, during the Caroline War phase of the Hundred Years' War - was named after the town for largely procedural reasons: an English fleet of 51 vessels anchored at Margate Roadstead spotted a Franco-Castilian-Flemish wine fleet of as many as 360 ships and gave chase, finally defeating them off Cadzand in Zeeland a day later. Almost nothing of the battle actually happened near Margate. The name stuck anyway.
The seaside-resort era began in the 18th century, accelerated by the easy Thames route from London and the arrival of the railways. The bathing machines used at Margate were described in 1805 as 'four-wheeled carriages, covered with canvas, and having at one end of them an umbrella of the same materials which is let down to the surface of the water, so that the bather descending from the machine by a few steps is concealed from the public view, whereby the most refined female is enabled to enjoy the advantages of the sea with the strictest delicacy.' The physician John Coakley Lettsom chose Margate in the late 18th century as the site for the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital - the first such institution in Britain. The town's nickname is 'Sunny Margate'; the rainfall is among the lowest in Kent, the sunshine high, the climate softer than most of England. The Walpole Bay Tidal Pool, built in 1937, is a four-acre Grade II-listed swimming structure refreshed twice daily by the incoming tide.
In 1835 something extraordinary was rediscovered beneath a garden in Margate. The Shell Grotto is a winding underground passageway about 70 feet long, hewn through chalk, terminating in a rectangular 'altar chamber.' Almost every surface - walls, vaulted ceilings, the dome above the central rotunda - is covered in mosaic made entirely of seashells. Mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, oysters. About 4.6 million of them. The shells form star and sun shapes, flowing patterns, geometric designs. Most are local - gatherable from Walpole Bay or Pegwell Bay or Shellness on Sheppey - but the flat winkles used for the background infill are rarely found locally and may have come from coastlines west of Southampton. The grotto's age is genuinely unknown. A 2006 Kent Archaeological Society assessment suggested it began as a medieval denehole (a small chalk mine), was reworked and decorated in the 17th or 18th century, and then further embellished in the early 19th. People have argued, with varying degrees of seriousness, for Phoenician origins, Bronze Age Minoan parallels, an 18th-century rich man's folly, or even something connected to Freemasonry. None of the explanations entirely satisfies. The Shell Grotto is Grade I listed - the highest heritage protection in England - which means that whatever it is, the country has decided to keep it.
Margate declined in the late 20th century along with most British seaside towns. The Margate Jetty was destroyed in the storm of 11 January 1978. Day trippers kept coming, but the residential holiday economy collapsed under cheap package holidays abroad, and the infrastructure followed. The Turner Contemporary art gallery, opened on 16 April 2011, was deliberately positioned to restart the town. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, it stands next to the harbour in roughly the same spot where Turner himself painted; the view from inside the gallery is essentially the view he painted. The artist Tracey Emin, who grew up here, championed the scheme. New independent businesses began arriving in the late 2010s, particularly in Cliftonville. The Dreamland amusement park reopened in 2015 after a public campaign saved its Grade II*-listed Scenic Railway. The Libertines now own a hotel and recording studio in Cliftonville and recorded their 2024 album All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade there. Margate hosted the Turner Prize exhibition in 2019. None of this fixes the harder problems of a town whose deprived wards remain among Kent's most struggling - but the art, the music, the strange seashell temple beneath someone's garden, and the chalk-cliff sunsets that pulled Turner back here year after year continue to do what they have always done.
Located at 51.385°N, 1.384°E on the northern coast of the Isle of Thanet in Kent. From the air, Margate sits at the eastern tip of the Thames Estuary's south shore; key landmarks are the curve of Margate Sands, the Turner Contemporary gallery beside the harbour, and the Dreamland Cinema tower with its distinctive Art Deco signage. London Manston Airport (EGMH) lies about 5 nm south. The Thanet Offshore Wind Farm sits visible offshore, completed in 2010. North Foreland lighthouse is roughly 3 nm east at the corner of the Isle of Thanet.