Folkestone residents' views sought on new park play area
The council said Folkestone – A Brighter Future would provide a boost to the regeneration of the town centre. Work has started on the £20m-scheme and is expected to finish in the summer of 2026.
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The Guardian
18-07-2025
- The Guardian
Mutant seabirds, sewer secrets and a lick of art ice-cream: Folkestone Triennial review
Folkestone doesn't have a pier. It has an Arm. That's what the harbour's long walkway into the Channel is called. It is a suitably surreal, even grotesque setting for the Folkestone Triennial artworks that infest its salty nooks and crannies – or armpits and elbow crooks. Laure Prouvost has placed a mutant seabird, with three heads and an electric plug on its tail, on the adjacent concrete stump of the defunct ferry terminal. Surprising? Not really if you have just visited The Ministry of Sewers, an installation by Cooking Sections that documents and protests the poisoning of our rivers and seas. There's nothing like an exhibit on the scale of Britain's water pollution to kick off a day at the seaside. It's cloudy when I visit, the cliffs and sea swathed in white mist and the water under the Arm looking like a detergent soup. It all adds to the uncanny mood. And art doesn't come much more uncanny than the sculpture by Dorothy Cross near the far end of the Arm. You have to go down soaking wet, concrete steps to a recess with a precipitous opening to the evil-looking sea. 'Try not to fall in,' says the attendant, who stays up above. Here you find a massive block of blood-coloured marble, as if a giant tuna steak had been stashed here by fish smugglers. The sides are smooth, the top uneven and rough. Out of this earthy hulk Cross has carved several pairs of feet in hyperrealistic detail, nervously walking its beach-like surface. They face out to sea, as if about to make a bold leap into the blue-green water, to find a better life. Cross has made a monument to migrants. The marble she has used is from Syria, the feet pattering over it full of fear and hope. These lifelike appendages and the surface on which they stand echo Magritte's surrealist 1934 painting The Red Model, of disembodied feet on red ground, while her use of massive, raw stone to suggest infinite sorrow - the weight of the world - shows she understands Michelangelo. This is a superb sculpture, brilliantly sited. It would be worth visiting Folkestone just to see it. But there's more – if you fancy a walk. Up above the cliffs, on steep green downs guarded by Martello towers built to fend off invasion during the Napoleonic wars, are a string of thoughtful, often witty artworks. A monolith that looks as if it were made from glue and plastic stands alone on a mowed hill, facing the sea. Approaching, you read the words 'Curse dissolved'. That's heartening. The brochure describes this piece by South African artist Dineo Seshee Raisibe Bopape as 'meditative' but it made me laugh. What is the curse? Who lifted it? I chew on this as I climb to a white circular tower inside which Katie Paterson also plays with magic. Paterson shows, on curving display tables inside the round room where red-coated soldiers once lived, a collection of mystic charms from different times and places. There are images of ancient Egyptian gods, Buddhist amulets and a tiny figure of the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu who features in The Exorcist. Each replica is cast in materials that bear witness to planetary crisis, including space debris from satellites and plastic from the Mariana trench. Paterson has a track record of working with scientists to get her hands on such exotic materials. Her installation is a more refined version of the Ministry of Sewers, a sly way to show us that we are turning everything to crap. These amulets are bluntly satirical. They seem to mock the magical thinking of those who would wish away the Earth's crisis. If you head on to the next Martello tower you might be momentarily cheered up by Jennifer Tee's wavy picture of a giant kelp, mapped in the grass in brown bricks which also have sea kelp and other life forms imprinted on their surfaces. It makes you look out to the sea below and imagine the threatened life it holds. There are jollities to be found in this seaside art trail – for the kids, Monster Chetwynd has started building an adventure playground, and down in the harbour you can get Emeka Ogboh's 'artist designed ice-cream'. But then I find huge burial urns littered in the high moorland overlooking the misty Channel. Sara Trillo has modelled these deathly objects on bronze age grave goods. They return you to melancholy: the view from here is as bleak as it is beautiful. Folkestone Triennial opens on 19 July
BBC News
06-07-2025
- BBC News
Battle of Britain's 85th anniversary commemorated in Kent
A service to mark the 85th anniversary of the Battle of Britain has taken place at a cliff-top memorial in first decisive battle in history to be fought in the air began on 10 July 1940 and reached its climax on 15 September, which became known as Battle of Britain service in Capel-le-Ferne, near Folkestone, on Sunday was attended by relatives of people who fought in the Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said: "It's through this memorial that we can educate those who were not alive during the war about the sacrifices made, not only by those brave men in the air, but also the people on the ground who got them up there." The service of commemoration is held every year on the nearest Sunday to the start of the Stephen Dalton, president of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust, said: "Its important that families have somewhere they can come to meet and remember and to lay flowers, but also for the next generation to experience a little of what it would have been like to fly in times of war."Alex Scott, from Cambridge, came to lay flowers for his father Jaromir Strihavka, who was a Czech pilot and flew in the Battle of Britain."I know the effort that goes into maintaining a place like this and it's great that the trustees invite us to take part in such a special event," he said.
The Sun
03-06-2025
- The Sun
Greedy smuggling gangs cramming more migrants into small boats as Labour's excuse for record arrivals is sunk
GREEDY smuggling gangs are cramming ever more migrants into small boats — as the Government's excuse for record arrivals was sunk. The number of dinghies carrying 80 or more people tripled in just one year. 3 In the 12 months to April, there were 33 compared to 11 in 2024 and just one in 2023. And there were 312 boats carrying 60 or more compared to 153 the year before. The dangerous squeeze emerged yesterday when the Home Office published for the first time data on both the number of migrants -per-boat and how weather affected the crisis. Labour has tried to blame recent sunny spells for a higher number of migrants completing Channel crossings. They pointed out the last year saw 190 so-called calmer 'red days' — up from 106. But Sky News research showed that in rougher conditions small boat journeys were still up 30 per cent. Last night the Home Office said smugglers overloading boats was 'all the more reason why we should crack down on their vile trade'. Afghans Shah Salim Sajjadi, 38, and Safiollah Mohammadi, 25, were yesterday jailed for eights months each in Folkestone after a woman and child died in the overcrowded Channel dinghy they captained. A probe into the deaths continues. 3
