From sea-water baths to Dreamland: the story of Margate

Long before anyone came to Margate for the sea air, it was a working harbour on the north shore of the Isle of Thanet. Early records spell the name in several ways, among them Marguet, Mergate and Meregate. The oldest survivor from those centuries is the parish church of St John the Baptist: the earliest part of the present building dates from 1124, and the large, low church is listed at Grade I.

The town lived on farming and shipping, and it became a 'limb' of Dover, which tied it to one of the Cinque Ports of the Kent coast. A description published in 1723 called it 'a small Fishing Town', while Daniel Defoe noted the great quantity of corn shipped from here for the London market. Ships were sheltered by a timber pier built in the form of a half moon. The Margate Civic Society adds that smuggling played its own part in the local economy.

In 1736 a local carpenter, Thomas Barber, advertised a bath into which sea water flowed on every tide. A study in Archaeologia Cantiana, the Kent Archaeological Society's journal, calls him the founder of modern Margate, and Historic England says the town was the first to offer sea-water baths to visitors. Salt water was then prized for health, and Margate was well placed to supply it to London.

Bathing machines soon stood along the sands. Contrary to a popular story, the bathing machine was not invented here, but a Margate glove and breeches maker, Benjamin Beale, added a canvas hood so that bathers could step down into the sea out of sight of the beach. Sources differ on the exact year; it was around the middle of the 18th century.

Fashionable visitors expected more than a dip. Cecil Square, laid out in 1769 with Assembly Rooms and a library, was the first new square of its kind at an English seaside resort. The Theatre Royal was first built in 1787, and the council describes it as the UK's second-oldest working theatre, although its doors have been closed since 2022.

Sea bathing also became medicine for those who could not pay for it. In 1791 Dr John Coakley Lettsom, a Quaker physician, founded the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital for the scrofulous poor of London, giving them the benefit of the sea; Historic England describes it as the first hospital of its kind in the world.

Most early visitors arrived by water. Before 1815 they came down the Thames on hoys, sailing packets and yachts; from 1815 steamboats ran from London on a regular basis, and visitor numbers climbed.

To shelter the shipping, the engineer John Rennie designed a new stone pier, finished in 1815, which survives today as the Harbour Arm with its bars and galleries. In 1824 the Margate Pier and Harbour Company put up the Jarvis Landing Stage, a wooden jetty 1,100 feet long, for the steamers. An iron jetty designed by Eugenius Birch replaced it in the 1850s and served the town until it closed in 1976.

The railway arrived in 1846, when the line across Thanet reached a seafront station later known as Margate Sands. A second company, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, opened its own Margate station in 1863. The station passengers use today is a monumental classical building of 1926, listed at Grade II.

In 1835 a schoolmaster and his sons, digging in their back garden, broke into an underground passage and chamber lined with shells. The Shell Grotto opened to paying visitors in 1838 and is now listed at Grade I.

J. M. W. Turner first knew Margate as a boy in the 1780s, when he stayed here for further schooling, and some of his earliest drawings date from that stay. He kept coming back. By the 1830s he was making regular visits to lodge with his landlady, Mrs Booth, and Tate links the unfinished sea paintings of his last two decades to the growing amount of time he spent on this coast.

According to John Ruskin, Turner said that the most beautiful skies in the world known to him were those of the Isle of Thanet. Anyone who has watched an evening sky over Margate Sands will see what he meant.

Mrs Booth's guesthouse has gone, but its site is now occupied by Turner Contemporary, the gallery designed by David Chipperfield that opened on 16 April 2011.

With the railway bringing ever larger crowds, Margate turned to entertainment. From 1867 pleasure grounds known as the Hall by the Sea grew up on the seafront, developed most famously by the circus proprietor 'Lord' George Sanger. The Winter Gardens, a concert hall in neo-Grecian style, opened in 1911.

In 1920 the promoter John Henry Iles opened Dreamland on the site. Its Scenic Railway, a timber roller coaster, followed on 3 July 1920, two months after the park itself.

The town also gave English poetry one of its starkest lines. Late in 1921 T. S. Eliot worked on The Waste Land in Margate, writing in a letter of 4 November that he had done so 'while sitting in a shelter on the front'. The Nayland Rock shelter, plausibly the very spot, was listed at Grade II in 2009, and the poem keeps the place name: 'On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.'

In May 1940 Margate was on the front line of the Dunkirk evacuation. On 30 May the town's lifeboat, Lord Southborough, crossed to France and brought some 600 men off the beaches; her coxswain, Edward Drake Parker, received the Distinguished Service Medal. Tens of thousands of soldiers were landed at Margate, and the Winter Gardens became a receiving station for them.

The post-war decades brought change. Over the Whitsun bank holiday of 1964 some 400 Mods and Rockers clashed in the town, and a magistrate, Dr George Simpson, dismissed them as 'petty little sawdust Caesars'. The 18-storey Arlington House rose above the sands in the same decade. By the 1970s cheap package holidays abroad were drawing families away, and a storm surge on 11 and 12 January 1978 wrecked the old iron jetty.

The revival came through heritage and art. In 2002 the Scenic Railway became the first amusement ride to be given listed status; a fire in 2008 destroyed about a quarter of its timber structure, and Dreamland reopened in June 2015 after a restoration overseen by the designer Wayne Hemingway. In January 2026 Dreamland announced that the Scenic Railway would retire from operation as a ride. Turner Contemporary, opened in 2011 by Tracey Emin and Jools Holland, hosted the Turner Prize in 2019, when the prize went jointly to all four nominees. Emin, who grew up in Margate, opened her own studios here in March 2023.