An Arty Weekend in East Kent by Stephen Emms
Featured Hotel in Kent
Chilston Park
See all hotels in Kent >
A dozen boats creak in the low-tide mud. Gulls guard orange-green nets slung out to dry around the harbour. Pensioners stand and stare, or gobble bowls of cockles. And, just up the cliff, my partner Russell and I are examining Tracey Emin’s bronze cardigan folded over a railing – but also earwigging a conversation in a garden below.
“I see them spraying it,” rasps a rotund woman hanging out the washing, “but I don’t know what it means.”
“She’s done baby stuff,” says a vicar, leaning on her wall, “because she wants a baby, doesn’t she?” It’s hard not to smile but it’s as valid an interpretation as any. And whilst this inaugural Triennial of 22 international artists (the brainchild of local millionaire Roger De Haan) is dominating talk in Folkestone and beyond, it’s worth also visiting nearby Margate and Whitstable, both of which offer full summer arts calendars including the latter’s third Biennale. Connecting the three towns is Walker & Bromwich’s mirror-tiled Celeste yacht, a sound work which, having begun its odyssey in Whitstable last weekend, reaches Margate and Folkestone shortly after.
But we start at the Triennial, whose 50-odd works, probing Folkestone’s decline and regeneration, are dispersed through cobbled streets, harbour and manicured grand marine promenade, the Leas, challenging the notion that public art has to be Gormley-style visible.
It seems a Sisyphean task to track them down, but, detailed maps in hand, we begin at David Batchelor’s Disco Mecanique in the Metropole hotel, its rotating spheres of plastic sunglasses suggesting waltzing Edwardian couples. Turner prize winner Mark Wallinger’s Folk Stones, also on the Leas, is a simple war memorial, whilst more provocative are Nathan Coley’s illuminated sign Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens, and Tracey Emin’s addictive bronze castings, Baby Things, a reference to the town’s teen pregnancy rate, strewn across seven different locations, from railing to kerb.
Back up on the Leas, after an alfresco lunch in the Creative Quarter’s Whole World Café, we stroll to our hotel in the neighbouring village of Sandgate, Boulogne flashing her pants across the water. The pine-filled coastal park seems attractively Mediterranean, a point borne out by Richard Wentworth’s plaques highlighting non-indigenous palms, privets and tamarisks – a wry comment on the town’s history of immigration.
Bare feet on wooden slats, elbows resting on wrought-iron railings, we sip gin and tonics on our veranda at The Sandgate, a boutique hotel, as the silvery sea sucks on the shingle, and Dungeness power station glows beyond. Downstairs, dinner includes deliciously squirting goose egg and Romney Marsh Lamb, and we watch the pink of the deep horizon gradually darken to black-blue beyond the restaurant’s vast windows.
The next morning, in hazy lemon sun, we take the coastal train to Margate. Initial signs are unpromising – the gum-coloured tower block, the joke shop sign saying ‘still here, this is no joke’, the man squeezing himself out of a fish ‘n’ chip shop, the arson-scarred remains of the Grade II-listed rollercoaster (“Everything here gets left till it’s forgotten about,” says bingo-worker Kim) – but, undeterred, we sweep along the blustery sands to the artistic hub of the Old Town.
Until the new gallery opens, the Turner Contemporary is housed in the former M&S on the High Street, currently showing Walker & Bromwich’s On The Threshold Of A Dream, a light-hearted inflatable work about conflict and escape, accompanied by their roving Celeste. I ask 74 year old gallery assistant Sadie Howlett what she loves about Margate. “Its slightly seedy side,” she says, “and thank God it’s not Boredstairs.” She rolls her eyes at the award-winning resort down the road.
You can’t miss the summer-long installation of twelve ‘Shell Ladies’ scattered across town, but more progressive are the new galleries and cafes emerging on the fern-filled harbour arm, its cheery colours based on Turner’s palette, including the IOTA studio (Isle Of Thanet Arts), and, in late July, a flagship fish restaurant “by a mother and son from Masterchef,” says Sadie.
Worth a snoop too are the designs at Droit House for the new Turner gallery and boutique hotel. For lunch head to No 6 restaurant in the Market Place; the Harbour Café and Impressions on the piazza are inferior in both food and service.
As we edge back past the amusement arcade, the Wetherspoon’s and the Bingo, Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time is belting out of a pub next to the station: “When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away,” she sings, poignantly, as we glance back at solitary figures silhouetted on the sand, gazing out to the steely sea.
Whitstable may be only 20 minutes away on the train, but after Margate’s world-weary charm (the old girl was the UK’s first resort in 1753), it feels rather pert. On the shore masts clang politely, as insistent as a well-bred child thwacking a xylophone, and day-trippers stroll with outsize 99 flakes past shops with names like ‘Urbanista’.
Within this suburban modesty the Biennale is enjoying its third season. After the ambition of the Triennial it feels bite-size, but its key works are as striking as any: Brit wunderkind Ryan Gander’s Plasticine animation, with a Richard Briers voiceover, is unsettling and funny, whilst most compelling is Serena Korda’s Library of Secrets, an interactive work inviting hand-written confessions to be hidden within its books. “None of you know I’m a transsexual,” reads one secreted in What Katy Did. Which begs the question: why that novel?
Outside on the shingle, the Celeste yacht, just offshore, broadcasts 1970s rock and speech fragments to punters in chunky headphones borrowed from a beach kiosk; a surreal sight. We drink a farewell pint, the water shining like polished metal, when a fisherman, slumped on a deckchair with bandaged knee, arms raised behind his head, says: “Have you seen my cart, son? Now that’s art. It’s been around long enough.”