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Daily Mirror
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
I live near one of the UK's 'best beaches' but there's a nicer one 10 minutes down the road
It's less than two hours from London and often features in top 10 lists — but I think it's overrated. Last week, The Times released a list of what it says are the 50 best beaches in the UK. The list was wonderfully varied, with sandy and shingle beaches and more rural locations featured. Living in a seaside town in Kent, I am incredibly passionate about some of my local beaches. Deal, Kingsdown and Folkestone are some of my favourites. Scanning the list, I was intrigued to see which Kent beach would feature in the 'South England' section, if any at all. I was disappointed to find Margate was the only beach to feature. It's not a particularly bad beach — but it is the most overrated. Margate is a trendy, buzzy town that is particularly popular among Londoners who travel down on a Friday evening for a weekend by the sea. And who can blame them? In theory, Margate has everything you could want: a sandy beach, plenty of good bars, restaurants and pubs, boutique shops and a trendy art scene, with the Turner Contemporary being particularly popular. The town is also known for Dreamland, an amusement park and music venue where the Sugababes, Olly Murs, Madness, and McFly will perform this year. One of the town's main attractions is its sandy beach and traditional seaside amusements, which are always good fun, even if you're not one for coin pushers and claw machines. However, when I last visited, I couldn't help feeling quite underwhelmed. I was met with piles of rubbish, a lingering sewage-y scent wafting through the air and a group of drunken men who proceeded to shout lewd remarks at me and my husband as we headed back towards the train station. The town felt rundown, unkept and the wrong side of 'gritty'. I left feeling disappointed, and in all honesty, I haven't dared to go near the beach since. Even the stunning sunset reflected across the beach in the evening couldn't change my mind. Rather than heading to Margate this summer, I'd highly recommend the quaint seaside town of Broadstairs, which is located just 10 minutes away. Broadstairs has several beaches, with Viking Bay and Botany Bay being the most popular. Viking Bay has beautiful golden sands, beach huts, and a fantastic tidal pool. It's the perfect spot to kick back and relax or enjoy a leisurely walk. Further up the coast, the secluded Botany Bay offers beautiful views of the white cliffs and chalk stacks. It's usually quieter than Viking Bay and is more suited to those who want to explore rock pools or hunt for fossils. Joss Bay is also a popular spot with steep chalk cliffs and golden sands that stretch for 200 metres. It's also the best beach in Thanet for surfing. Broadstairs itself is charming with an olde-worlde feel that can only be experienced in a handful of ungentrified seaside towns in the UK. Fishermen's cottages can be found in the heart of the town, as well as a 1950s ice cream parlour and plenty of quaint pubs. Broadstairs was known to be Charles Dickens' favourite spot for a holiday - and it's easy to see why. Next time you're heading to the Kent coast, give trendy Margate a miss and instead give this charming town a try, you won't be disappointed.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on young people in coastal towns: time to invest in their future
Wish you were here? In recent years the fate of coastal towns has emerged as one of Britain's most pressing social issues. Both the fishing and domestic tourism industries have been in decline for decades. Seaside communities routinely find themselves at the wrong end of national league tables when it comes to deprivation, job opportunities, educational attainment and mental and physical health. As the Guardian's new reporting project on young people in coastal towns makes clear, the result for many 16- to 25-year-olds is acute frustration combined with the pressure of unwanted dilemmas. Most remain fiercely loyal to places whose geographic isolation tends to generate a strong sense of belonging. But getting out to get on is, too often, perceived as the only option. The steady stream of departures in turn takes away skills and youthful dynamism, further diminishing the prospects of those left behind. Those growing up amid the natural beauty and social challenges of Britain's coastal communities deserve better. But as one recent study points out, the failure of past regeneration strategies suggests that a political rethink is necessary. Successful urban transformation projects, such as the re-imagining of Liverpool's post-industrial waterfront, will not map on to smaller places unable to tap global investment possibilities. Similarly, the scale of the culture-led revival of Margate – sparked by the opening of the Turner Contemporary gallery in 2011 – is out of reach for most towns, particularly those further away from London. Over the course of the next year, the Guardian will continue to canvass young people on what can be done to build better futures in Britain's post-industrial port towns and hard-pressed seaside resorts. But one early conclusion can already be drawn: unleashing the energy, imagination and local pride of the young can be a vital catalyst for positive change. In Blackpool, for example, where 28% of the population were classed as economically inactive last year, a small-scale dance club founded in 2006 has evolved into a multi-purpose arts hub, offering direction and myriad activities to hundreds of teenagers. Its co-founder told the Guardian: 'The optics are all wrong. You need to show young people that there are people in town doing creative, inspiring things.' Writ large, that approach would mean sustained, gamechanging investment in social capital as well as physical infrastructure. The benefits of the offshore wind revolution have yet to make a significant impact to the economic prospects of towns such as Great Yarmouth or Newhaven. Much more needs to be done to ensure that young people have access to the skills that will allow them to take advantage of the shift to renewable energy. In seaside resorts, where the interests of free-spending tourists are prioritised and work dries up out of season, the closure of local youth clubs and cuts to other leisure facilities have deepened a sense of neglect and abandonment. For too long, the struggles of communities with rich histories and a powerful sense of identity have languished near the bottom of Westminster priorities. 'Growing up, I was always told to get out of Grimsby,' one young respondent told our reporters. With the right mix of long-term investment and empowerment in our coastal towns, it doesn't need to be that way.
West Australian
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Turning heads on a 250th anniversary
Joseph Mallord William Turner — often better known simply as J.M.W. Turner — is revered perhaps more than any other artist to emerge from Britain. And this year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, will see events and exhibitions taking place across the island. Here are some of the key places paying homage and which showcase some of Turner's best watercolours, oil paintings and sketches. Born into a working/lower-middle-class family in the Covent Garden district of the capital, and keeping a Cockney accent all his life, Turner is the face of the £20 note and a star turn at some of London's top galleries. The Tate Britain has the largest free collection of Turners anywhere, and it's also compiling a comprehensive catalogue of his 37,500 works, which will be available to browse on its website. Meanwhile, the National Gallery by Trafalgar Square boasts what is frequently touted as Turner's most famous painting, The Fighting Temeraire (1838), which features his distinctive brushwork and trademark shafts of colour and light, depicting an old warship being towed at sunset on the River Thames. You'll also find Turner pieces at the Royal Academy of Arts, the prestigious institution that enrolled him as an art student when he was 14. Other spots on London's Turner trail include the artist's former country retreat, now a museum between the south-western suburbs of Richmond and Twickenham (this year it's exhibiting a batch of his watercolours of animals, birds and fish) and St Paul's Cathedral, where he was buried after his funeral on December 30, 1851. Lauded as a romantic landscape painter, Turner was also attracted to the sea, and spent a lot of time painting on the south coast of England, particularly in Kent, where the town of Margate is home to the Turner Contemporary. This striking 21st-century gallery, on the site of an old guesthouse where Turner used to stay, is on the Margate seafront with inspiring views through its floor-to-ceiling windows of the sea and the broad sandy beach. Exhibitions by artists — local and global — are held here, and this year, on loan from Tate, Turner's 1840 piece, Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (Study for Rockets and Blue Lights), is on display, accompanied by activities to celebrate the artist's connections with the town. One highlight of the year-long festival is a poem by Margate artist Tracey Emin, a kind of love letter to Turner, which is projected at the gallery. Margate, incidentally, featured in the 2014 biopic, Mr Turner, with Timothy Spall in the lead role, although the coast of Cornwall stood in for Kent on screen. Stocked with one of the most important collections of Turner watercolours outside of London, the Whitworth Gallery is a gem in Manchester's leafy university district. One of its big exhibitions for 2025, supplemented with loans from Tate Britain, is Turner: In Light and Shade. Last presented here more than a century ago, it focuses on the 71 prints from the artist's Liber Studiorum project, which Turner crafted in the first quarter of the 19th century. Comprising an evocative cluster of sepia-toned drawings, etchings, mezzotints and copper plates, it features mostly land and seascapes that Turner captured across Britain and Europe, including pieces from the north of France, Italy and the Swiss Alps. You can ponder what you've seen at the gallery's glass-fronted cafe, which overlooks the trees and sculptures of Whitworth Park. Turner's legacy is such that the UK's most acclaimed annual award for contemporary art is named after him. This year's Turner Prize is taking place in Bradford, the 2025 UK Capital of Culture (and the birthplace of another well-known artist, David Hockney, who once curated an exhibition of Turner watercolours at Tate Britain). Also set in a lovely park, and containing a special gallery dedicated to Hockney, Cartwright Hall is hosting the Turner Prize 2025 exhibition from September 27 to February 22, 2026. Visitors will be able to peruse work from the shortlisted contenders: Nnena Kalu, a Glasgow-born artist who makes cocoon-like installations using materials like fabrics, paper and cellophane; London-based photographer Rene Matic; Zadie Xa, a Korean-Canadian who now resides in London and weaves painting, mural, textile and sound; and Mohammed Sami, who's originally from Baghdad and best-known for his large-scale paintings about war, memory and loss. Also in Yorkshire, Harewood House, an elegant pile outside Leeds that Turner once painted, has an exhibition that celebrates both him and Jane Austen, who was also born 250 years ago this year. It looks at their shared interest in the society and culture of the British country house and its landscape. In England's north-west, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool will host Turner: Always Contemporary (October 25 to February 22, 2026), tracing both the artist's own work and his enduring impact on later generations, covering themes like travel, landscape, and artistic experimentation. Scotland was another place that enchanted Turner. He painted its lochs, mountains and castles, and also portrayed the streets and setting of Edinburgh on canvas. If you happen to be in Scotland's capital next January, pay a visit to the Scottish National Gallery. For more than a century, it has showcased the watercolours of Turner throughout the first month of the year — respecting a wish by Henry Vaughan, an art collector and Turner fan, who gifted 38 works to the gallery in 1899. + To plan a trip to Britain, see
Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
How a deprived corner of Kent became a magnet for London's wealthy
Jamie Currie is sitting on a bench in Margate eating an ice cream with his 92-year-old father, David. The thing about the town, he says, is that 'it's a mixture between a good manicure and dirt under your fingernails'. It has long been cheery, but deprived. But in recent years, it has become a fashionable magnet for Londoners, nicknamed 'Shoreditch-on-Sea'. Nearly 6,000 people from the capital relocated to the wider district of Thanet in the three years following the pandemic alone. This invasion of so-called DFLs (Down From Londoners) is a gentrifying force, especially in Margate's Cliftonville neighbourhood – stretching from the Turner Contemporary on the harbour arm to the Walpole Bay Tidal Pool. Telegraph analysis, using data from our tool, found that Cliftonville West is the place that has gentrified the most in all of England over the past decade. This is based on a combination of household disposable income data, higher education attainment, house prices and a deprivation score, taking into account everything from poor health and disability rates, to crime and access to services. The numbers lay bare a rapid pace of change. Property in Cliftonville West costs double what it did in 2010, the proportion of residents who are university graduates almost doubled between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, and average earnings shot up by more than £10,000 between 2012 and 2020. Long-time locals and newcomers alike are keenly aware this has been both a blessing and a curse. But few believe things can go on in this way. 'I don't like things either too bleak or too tidied-up,' Currie, 55, adds. 'But I don't know how long that's going to last.' The top 0.1pc for deprivation 'Cliftonville as a name was invented by Victorian property developers,' says Dan Thompson, an artist and historian. Back in Charles Dickens' day, Margate was seen as 'a bit common and rough around the edges'. In a bid to make it look more upmarket and encourage tourism, homes in the brand new neighbourhood were built as deliberate replicas of London's stucco terraces. 'So the whole argument about DFLs,' adds Thompson, 'that's what this town is for, it's what it's always been for. It was built for that.' But therein lay the crux of the town's eventual decline – an almost exclusive reliance on seasonal holiday trade. 'After the Second World War, Margate didn't build any new hotels, it didn't build a new theatre or a conference centre, which all the other seaside towns did. So those places became more attractive to take your children to, and it became very much a day-tripping resort,' says Thompson. The hotels that once lined Cliftonville's streets closed down, leaving behind neglected properties ill-suited to local families. As early as the 1960s, London boroughs began snapping up addresses for affordable housing. What was left was truncated into tiny, cheap flats which, according to a council report from the early 2000s, attracted 'vulnerable and transient people to the area'. At that time, hospital admissions for alcohol or drugs were running at five times the average for Kent, and it accounted for 12pc of all crime in Thanet, despite housing just 5.5pc of the population. Knife amnesty bins remain on a few squares today, harking back to these more violent times. By 2010, the western end of Cliftonville encompassing the notorious Ethelbert and Athelstan Roads was the 33rd most deprived area in England, putting it in the top 0.1pc. 'A new tribe moved in' The turnaround since then has been stark, and one of the engines of this revival may be art. 'I'd say the Turner Contemporary is singularly responsible for the regeneration of Cliftonville,' said Heather Tait, 61. Since the gallery opened on the seafront back in 2011 – on the site of a boarding house frequented by the acclaimed Romantic painter JMW Turner – it has contributed more than £100m to the local economy, it claims, in the process establishing the town as a 'vibrant creative destination that artists and creatives now call home'. Tait is one of those artists who, with her husband, a sculptor, arrived from Brighton shortly after, attracted by the relative affordability of housing and the stimulating 'rawness' of the place. 'The first wave of arty-farties came when the Turner opened up,' she says. By the end of the decade, rock band The Libertines had converted a dilapidated Cliftonville B&B into a boutique hotel, and Time Out was on the cusp of pronouncing it the coolest neighbourhood in the country. After the pandemic, however, 'the energy changed' says Tait. 'The influencers started coming down. It didn't feel like it used to. A new tribe moved in – quite exclusive and wealthy.' Hollywood also contributed to Margate's newfound glitzy appeal, with 2023's Empire of Light starring Olivia Coleman and directed by Sam Mendes prompting a flurry of celebrities. Last year, Tait left for Scotland. Thompson was also very much a part of this 'first wave', migrating from Worthing back in 2013. 'If you came back then, you knew you were coming to a place where things would have to be done,' he says. 'You knew that if you wanted a nice coffee shop, you might have to open one. You had to get involved in the community. You knew that this town needed help and needed things to happen.' He adds: 'The wave that came down during and post-Covid were coming down seeing the town as finished. It had coffee shops, it had wine bars, it had galleries, it had all of that. They were coming down as consumers.' 'Old-time Margate people hate DFLs like us' Margate's fortunes started to rise in the Old Town, making Cliftonville the new frontier for the more recent influx. Sophie Brown, 34, moved from south London eight years ago. In 2022 she, her wife and three friends opened CAMP, a queer bar and community space on Northdown Road, the bustling commercial spine of the neighbourhood. 'There are a lot of old-time Margate people who absolutely hate DFLs like us. They think that we're coming in to gentrify the place and really destroy it. We think we're making it better and also trying to make things better for local people.' At a time when gay bars are shuttering across the land, CAMP has managed to keep the lights on, but it is tough and getting tougher. 'We're finding more so now that we have to step up prices, and actually I went to London recently and I didn't think our prices were that much lower anymore,' she says. 'But you can't price things for DFLs, expecting everyone to be on a London wage. The biggest thing for most people who have left London is that they can't afford the quality of life that they want there.' The housing market is perhaps the best indicator of this change. Brown sold her first house in town at more than double the purchase price just three years later, to a pair of Londoners. 'But that was a different time,' she says. 'We bought into the dream of what it was going to be, which fortunately it was.' Between 2020 and 2022 alone, just over 18,000 people uprooted themselves to Thanet from the rest of the UK. Some 6,000 of them came from London – a third of the total. Transactions averaged £229,000 in Cliftonville West over the past year, according to HM Land Registry – almost double the £117,000 in 2010. The pressure that this places on those who don't own property is all too real. Thompson was left homeless for six months last year due to a lack of affordable rental properties. Others can be seen sleeping rough under the Victorian shelter that fronts the main beach. 'I think the bubble is bursting a bit,' says Brown. 'Maybe the true colours are coming out with Reform coming in, and maybe people are realising it's not all as rosy as it seems here and there was a community here long before we showed up. 'People that were born and bred here, and they're pretty angry at us. We are part of the problem, there's no sugar-coating it.' 'People have had enough' In the May local elections, Kent County Council recorded the largest swing to Reform in the country. As the frontline for small boat arrivals across the Channel, Kent would seem fertile ground for the party. And while the proportion of white British residents declined only slightly over the decade between the 2011 and 2021 census, at 68.6pc, Cliftonville West is the most diverse neighbourhood in Thanet. But this was not what Jamie Henderson, the freshly elected Reform councillor for Margate, thinks got him over the line by just over 200 votes. 'People have just had enough of the old school.' He adds: 'I was out canvassing at a food festival and they were all coming up to me saying 'You're in the wrong place, we're all lefties here!' At that point I did think, 'Yes, maybe I didn't have it in the bag at all.' So there are a lot [of DFLs]... but not enough.' Tourists, meanwhile – Cliftonville's old lifeline – are flocking back. 'Every year the number of visitors increases,' says Jim Moran, 72, down on the sands of the Grade II-listed Walpole Bay Tidal Pool. 'The [number] of businesses is increasing, mostly street food and fine dining. It's a different demographic, but the traditional seaside holidaymakers are still well catered-for.' According to Cllr Rick Everitt, leader of Thanet District Council, the Cliftonville of today is 'the result of many years' work to improve living standards and housing stock, reduce deprivation and tackle the number of sub-standard rental properties.' Thompson adds: 'If you'd have come here in 2004 and spoken to local people, you wouldn't have wanted to come back. 'Now even the most grumpy of locals, who are moaning about the dog s--- and the bins not being emptied, they'll also tell you that the beaches and the sunsets are beautiful.'
Time Out
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The UK's best seaside town has been crowned – and it's just 90 minutes from London
London in the heat can be absolutely glorious, but it can also get a bit unbearable. So, we wouldn't blame you for wanting to escape the clammy city temperatures for somewhere more fresh and airy over the summer. Need some inspo? Well, now that beach season is finally upon us, Time Out's writers have ranked their favourite seaside towns in the UK for a summer getaway. And our number one spot happens to be within very easy reach of the capital city. Time Out's top UK seaside town for 2025 is Margate. Londoners can get there from London Victoria, St Pancras or London Bridge, with journeys normally lasting around an hour and a half to an hour and 50 minutes. One-way prices start from just £12, so how could you resist? Chiara Wilkinson, Time Out's deputy editor, said: 'Once a sleepy coastal town, [Margate is] now a cool creative hotspot – it's even (dare we say it) deserving of its new nickname, ' Hackney on sea'. But it's not all about being annoyingly trendy. There's a real charm to this strip of Kentish coast, where golden sands and fading arcades compliment a buzzing art scene and thriving hospitality offering.' Once you're there, Margate really does have something to satisfy every taste. For culture fiends, there's the Turner Contemporary and Tom Thumb Theatre; for foodies, we recommend the barbecued octopus paired with seasonal wine at Pomus or the famous anchovies at Sargasso; for revellers, there's the LGBTQ+ hoedown, Queer Cxntry, and for water babies, there's the Walpole Bay Tidal Pool, the largest saltwater pool in the UK. Plus, no one can miss Dreamland or the Grade I-listed Shell Grotto. Explore the rest of the very best things to see and do in Margate here. Number two on our list was the Yorkshire fishing town of Whitby, a place that we said 'exudes more gothic splendour than David Bowie in The Hunger '. And in third place was Brighton (also a short trip from London), for its parties, pubs and pebbled beach. The best seaside towns in the UK, according to Time Out.
