Margate has been on the up since the opening of the Turner Contemporary five years ago – and this cool hotel on the beach fits right in with the town’s burgeoning confidence
Down to Margate, went the Chas & Dave song, and for the past 50 years downward did seem to be the direction everything was heading in a town that, as early as the 1730s, was among the first to make going to the seaside a thing. Holidaymakers abandoned it; its pier burned down and wasn’t rebuilt; and the Dreamland pleasure park closed in 2003.
But we’d come to this corner of Kent to catch a resort on the up: since the opening of the Turner Contemporary art gallery five years ago this spring, and especially since Dreamland reopened last June, terms such as hipster paradise and Shoreditch-on-Sea are regularly applied to Margate. Its cute old town is now home to offbeat art galleries, vintage shops and microbreweries. And if there’s one thing Shoreditch types love, it’s somewhere groovy to stay.
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