Mining the Diaries 99: England
Flat 2 57 Kingsgate Avenue, Margate 11th November 2022
We drove to Margate, parked in Westbrook, climbed down onto the Westbrook Promenade and walked east in the shadow of the former Royal Sea Bathing Hospital. Dr John Coakley Lettsom, a Quaker physician founded the Hospital in 1791 for the treatment of scrofula (a disease of the cervical lymph nodes associated with tuberculosis). The Hospital ceased treating TB patients in the early 1950s. The original buildings date from 1793-96, but are now almost lost among the accumulated developments between 1816 and 1880 that created the huge pile dominating Westbrook. It has now been converted to apartments. We carried on past a group of stylish modern houses, a range of rather tatty amusements and a double decker bus doing duty as a café. The fine Royal Crescent (1856), part houses part hotel reflecting more prosperous times, looked imperiously out to sea. The hotel appeared deserted and abandoned and must present a formidable renovation challenge.
We took the slipway onto the beach; it was low tide and the Walpole Bay sea bathing pool stood above the sand on seaweed-green walls, at four acres it’s the largest sea bathing pool in the UK. A few desultory figures walked and exercised their dogs on the firm sand; and a lone mother and child sat making sandcastles. The sea wall, streaked like an abstract expressionist painting, offered an irresistibly precarious walk for a small boy. We strolled out along curve of the Harbour Arm Stone Pier to the lighthouse (1955) and the Shell Lady. The Shell Lady, more properly ‘Mrs Booth’, was created in 2008 by sculptor Ann Carrington as a tribute to Sophie Booth, landlady and lover to J.M.W. Turner.
Morning coffee and Portuguese custard tart (pastel de nata, who introduced them and when? – I never saw them in England five years ago) at the Coffee Company. Then to the Turner Contemporary for Next Fantastical Worlds, a collaboration between Year 8 students at Royal Harbour Academy and Project Motorhouse inspired by pop-up books and Alice in Wonderland. Twenty-one 21 students took part in workshops with photographer Tim Topple and artist Christopher Tipping. The group experimented with surreal photography, performance, and collage to reimagine Ramsgate. Both familiar and dreamlike, the artwork wove together real-life stories and fantastical events to create an otherworldly vision of their stuffy home town. Engaging and cleverly put together.