What have a multi-millionaire pop icon and a faded former Victorian seaside resort on the icy wind-ravaged January Kent coast got in common? If it’s Madonna and Margate – everything, says Ros Wynne Jones
Of course, the Queen of Pop is hung up on Margate. She’s the town’s natural soulmate, sharing its DNA like a stick of rock. Margate’s edgy, queer, tawdry glamour has drawn Material Girls to the coast since its Victorian heyday, when its grand promenades, and quirky ‘bathing machines’ lured Londoners south-east.
Margate is Kent’s Venice Beach without the sunshine. With an art deco lido, famous fish and chips, and a mysterious shell grotto, no wonder the High Priestess of Pop has said the town is her “idea of heaven”. For a Kiss-Me-Quick pop icon, this is surely a spiritual Holiday home – an immaculate collection of vintage shops, old school caffs and smuggler’s pubs.
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Meanwhile, the Dreamland vintage amusement park was partly inspired by Coney Island in New York – even if its 100-year-old rollercoaster recently closed for good. I partly grew up along the coast in Folkestone, to which Margate is the naughty cousin, and my parents are from the North Wales coast, where Rhyl and Llandudno are mirror images. Off season, our friends there love the wild skies and the camp air of the Morrissey song ‘Everyday’s like Sunday’.
I’m willing to bet there’s been a Madonna drag act or two at the Margate Arts Club. And if not, there will be now the Pop Queen has stunned visitors to the grassroots Off Season art show. With typical generosity, Madge, who has 20.3 million Instagram followers, tagged artists and their work in her posts from the town.
As the pop icon rightly recognises, Margate isn’t just any old kitsch coastal town, it’s a glittering seaside gem in the chalky cliffs of ‘Planet Thanet’ – as locals call the sticky-out left toe of England. Margate has been a dreamscape for artists since the days of the seascape painter JMW Turner who declared its skies “the loveliest in all Europe”. The poet TS Eliot was sent to recover there from a nervous breakdown, writing ‘On Margate Sands’.
On a recent rainy day trip, I braved the wintry Sea Scrub Sauna, where bathers can leap from the sauna into an old boating lake, and ate at the sublime Sargasso, hidden on the Harbour Arm, and well worth braving the unsavoury smells of the harbour for. After a blustery beach walk – my kids still fear the hailstones that knocked them off the beach when they were tiny – we had a pint in a tiny pub, where an old smuggler fed our dog crisps.
I’m going to guess Ms Ciccone’s favourite Italian restaurant is Bottega Caruso, a Foglianese eatery which also runs the cookery school next door – but the town is stuffed with places to eat cheaply, and has some of the finest breakfasts in England. Next time she should try Peter’s fish factory for a chip supper, and The Good Egg for a fry up.
The town’s parties have been legendary since the mods and rockers clashed on Margate Beach on the Whitsun bank holiday of 1964. But the resort fell on hard times when cheap flights sent British holidaymakers flocking abroad.
It has been rebuilt via the sheer energy of Madonna’s artist friend Tracey Emin – leading to the dazzling Turner contemporary art gallery and unmade beds all over town. Enthusing on Insta Madonna declared that her pal Tracey “is a Pearl. A precious necklace that has been draped around a seaside Town in England called Margate”.
Where the Pop Pioneer goes, Hollywood may follow. After all, nearby Pegwell Bay was where the Saxon princes Hengist and Horsa first came ashore in the 5th century, and started an invasion.“This is my idea of heaven,” Madonna wrote of Margate. “Whenever I go there, I feel like I’ve entered a dream.” Don’t we all, Madge.
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