(in the same sentence she says
I'm a fool for decaying northern towns; show me a frail-looking pier and I tear up.
I haven't been to Blackpool since I was a girl - my granny took us to Pontins
which means, "Since I'm being paid to write an article I slum it for a day, although I haven't been back since that one time at Pontins"...)
its woodies, and suggested that we 'enthusiasts' were somehow missing a trick by not realising that they weren't listed and we should see to it asap.
I came to Blackpool expecting to hate it; my stepfather, who grew up there, pronounced it 'a dump' and wished me luck. But I came away telling everyone what fun I'd had, from gawping at the circus to riding the Grand National rollercoaster at the Pleasure Beach (it dates from 1935 and is - attention rollercoaster nerds - one of only three surviving Moebius loop coasters in the world). If these things, and gems like the Tower Circus and the North Pier, aren't worth preserving, I'm not sure what is
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/0 ... achelcooke
Yeah right, Rache. Maybe you know a little better by now, and appreciate that the Nash was refused a listing in 2000 and if that wasn't going to be listed not a lot else possibly was going to be, and if we try BPB is likely to demolish before anyone gets a chance to visit to assess. Yes we know, we know, we don't need journalists to tell us what we already know about the failure of Those Responsible to take our seaside heritage too seriously. (Pleasureland, anyone? Flattened to make a 'classic resort'?) It's not our fault. We really aren't dimwits.
as for Margate, her research got as far as:
Margate
Kent
Then The first resort to introduce donkey rides, in 1890, and deck chairs in 1898, the pioneering Margate was the seaside spot of choice for Londoners until the Fifties.
Now Infamous for violence between mods and rockers in the 1960s, and for high unemployment rates, renewed affection for Margate came with the 2005 reopening of the Dreamland Amusement Park. Margate's own Tracey Emin is thought to have backed proposals to open the Turner Contemporary art gallery by the harbour.
Hmmmm. 2005?
So she's at it again in today's Observer.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gmg/op/vie ... at=Culture
If Margate were a blind date, waiting for you at a bar, you would turn on your heel and run. Who wants to spend an evening with a man whose front teeth are missing, whose expression is permanently leery, whose tatty clothes smell of stale chip fat and worse? And yet I fall for the town in the time it takes me to walk from the station to the prom. It's not that I don't try to resist. No sooner am I off my train than I'm counting the number of shops that are boarded up: those missing teeth. But when I get to 12 in almost as many paces I give this up as too depressing. Then it happens. Standing outside the elegant but derelict Dreamland cinema on the seafront - it's from 1935, the first English cinema to be modelled on the Titania Palast in Berlin, a style later made famous by Odeon - I look out towards the harbour wall where, in just two years' time, the town's new gallery, Turner Contemporary, designed by the architect David Chipperfield, will open its ritzy doors. Beside it, Margate's pastel Georgian houses are hunkered beneath the sky like little old ladies in coloured raincoats, and no wonder. As skies go, this one is as big and as brooding as they come, dirty clouds scudding across it as if they were in some strange meteorological race. The effect is beautiful, and extraordinary. It makes you ache for Margate: for all that it was, and for all that it could still be. Suddenly I'm head over heels in love.
Nice mention of the Shell Grotto (did she talk to you, Sarah?)
But back to Margate, where I am standing in the cold and soft drizzle. I have an appointment to see Victoria Pomery, the director of Turner Contemporary. First, though, I am going to look round. Let's see. The further I walk, the more boarded-up shopfronts I find; and yes, there are lots of signs offering cheap booze, breakfast all day, and all you-can-eat buffets. Nevertheless, Margate is invincibly lovely. It has the second oldest theatre in Britain, the Theatre Royal, which is exceedingly beautiful, and which is now run by someone very imaginative (his name is Will Wollen). It has a terrace of houses, recently restored, which looks just like New York's Flatiron building in miniature. It has the mysterious and beautiful Shell Grotto, a (Grade I listed) series of subterranean chambers whose walls are decorated with 4.6m cockles, whelks, mussels and oysters, and yet whose purpose, 174 years after its discovery, remains obscure. (Is it a pagan temple? A Regency folly? I don't know, but I love it either way.) It even has a nice old-fashioned hotel, the Walpole Bay, with its 1927 Otis trellis-gated lift servicing every floor. Not to mention fresh shellfish, which I buy from a family-run shack by the harbour, and scoff with a wooden fork. Does it really need a swanky art gallery, or would it be better served by a little love and attention, a decent marketing campaign, and some passionate word of mouth?
But Dreamland?
In 2008 there was the arson attack at Dreamland, Margate's famous amusement park, a fire which destroyed sections of its beloved Scenic Railway (the oldest operating rollercoaster in Britain and the first to be listed - Grade II - by English Heritage), and which effectively closed the doors of the park, in its current incarnation, for ever
Actually Rache EH doesn't list the Secretary of State has the final say, it's the ONLY roller coaster to be listed, and oh we do hope that Dreamland has closed its doors in its 'current incarnation' forever, as, em, a small bit of googling might have told you, it's currently a wasteland and had been for quite some time before the arson attack. See Rache, it's CLOSED. That's as in SHUT, NOT OPERATIONAL, and many another such expressions of finality. So you see, Rache, some of us don't want that to continue.
We (that's not we as in anyone connected with Dreamland) talk about the Dreamland project in Margate: local enthusiasts have been buying up heritage pleasure rides - most recently, Blackpool Pleasure Beach's Junior Whip - and are now raising money so that Dreamland can be reopened as the world's first amusement park of historic rides (the Deco cinema will also be restored, as a museum of street style). Last month the Dreamland Trust ... was awarded £384,500 by the Heritage Lottery Fund for its development plans; as I write, they await a decision on a £4m application to Sea Change. We both love this idea, born of local enthusiasm and pride. It seems to belong to Margate already - a privilege its new gallery will have to earn.
Perhaps it all comes down to what you call culture. I can think of few things lovelier than looking at a tempestuous Turner sky in the place where he painted it. But I also think that old wooden rollercoasters count as culture, too - not to mention fish and chips and mushy peas and Tizer. These things are part of who we are. They make our lives better, just as art does, and theatre, and music. To combine them, then, is very heaven. For our battered seaside resorts, all 250 of them, this must surely be the future.
Well yes - but did you not actually talk to anyone from the Dreamland Trust? Not as far as I can see. And yet you visited the Shell Grotto?
Locals? I'm not 'local' by any stretch of the imagination, and nor are many who support the revival of Dreamland. How about, also, all those other agencies involved? And part of what's happening is out of sheer bloody desperation, that historic seaside amusement parks are closing and rides being lost (as in bulldozed, as in Cyclone?). To late, Rache, too bloody late, that suddenly you have discovered what's happening. They are gone, and gone forever. 250? In yer dreams. Woodies - Blackpool, Gt Yarmouth, and well, that's it really. Scenic we can but hope is operational once more. Where have you been since that exchange of several e-mails in 2007, pointing out some of the problems? A little more support from the national media wouldn't have been such a bad thing.
How much do journos get paid for this stuff? Too %$£"&*^ much, whatever it is.
rachel dot cooke at observer dot uk is her e-mail, for anyone else wanting a rant directly...
Last week she wrote an article moaning about a weekend at Broadstairs. Well, of course, dear, the reason places like this have become rundown, and why they are trying to reinvent themselves through things other than the trad seaside attractions, is because the chattering classes who write for the Londoncentric meeja haven't exactly been supportive have they, for the past twenty years or so, jetting off for hols to Tuscany, and when they do like to be beside the seaside it's Whitstable and Southwold, where you can meet up with chums from the London meeja sporting their Boden, and not worry about dereliction and uncouth locals. So possibly that's why it wasn't just waiting for you to discover it, with bijou caffs and stuff springing up just because suddenly you deign to grace the place for an entire weekend in search of retro fun (enjoyed with a tinge of irony, natch)? (And when the finances pick up, will you still be writing about it all then?)
http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gmg/op/sLa ... cat=Search
Here's the menu and pricelist of the Sportsman at Seasalter, where the poor dear had to go to eat:
http://www.thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk/menus.shtml
as there was nowhere in Broadstairs which could serve her fish. What, no local chippy with those mushy peas and Tizer this week you rave about? (At the prices charged in the Sportsman, which is actually Whitstable, you could feed a family for a month at my local chippy.)
.Nor could we find anywhere for dinner in the town. Or at least, not if we wanted to eat fresh fish, which seemed a reasonable enough desire, given our, er, proximity to the sea. Instead, we drove for 40 minutes to the Sportsman in Seasalter, where we devoured oysters and turbot, marvelled at the briny freshness of both and resisted the temptation to kiss the landlord by way of thanking him for his Kentish missionary zeal
(Whitstable Native Oysters £2.50 each, no mention of turbot on the sample menu, but Braised brill fillet with a mussel tartare £19.95)
Her article prompted a number of letters:
The Observer Letters Sun 16 Aug 2009 13:45 BST
Reading Rachel Cooke's piece ("Bugger Broadstairs for another holiday", Comment, last week) was enough to almost ruin any Sunday lunch. Her assertions cry out for correction.
Coffee? One hundred yards left, 100 yards right or 100 yards straight up the high street. Sea food restaurants, serving fresh fish? Two hundred yards right, 200 yards left.
There is no mention of the excellent Dickens House Museum or Crampton Tower or the Heritage and historic walks to guide you through the town or even the award-winning St Peter's Village Tour.
And I write from a town heaving with music and dance, ringing from every hostelry, cafe and cranny, as Folk Week struts its stuff.
Perhaps you feel more comfortable with Whitstable, the BBC's second-home heaven, known locally as Islington by the sea. I must go. A morris man is pressing a handkerchief in my hand and, when I am done, excellent coffee and fish await those who know where to go and don't fear a few yards'walk.
Chris Wells
Parish and district councillor, Viking Ward, Broadstairs, Kent.
Median net household income in this area is not over £20,000 and few visiting families have net household incomes exceeding £40,000. Whitstable is 40 minutes nearer London and can attract the critical mass of rich people to make high-quality restaurants a going concern. Most English resorts share Broadstairs problem. Ridiculous property and rental prices put all of Britain's hospitality trade at a disadvantage compared with the Med.
David Hopker
Broadstairs, Kent
■ I was sad to see Ye Olde Englishe Holidaye so maligned. I feel that Rachel has missed the point of her holiday. In terms of a Proustian recherche she would have been much better off going back to Pontins as the nostalgia induced by childhood memories cannot be underestimated. Once you remember that England is more photographer Martin Parr than retro designer Cath Kidston you're laughing.
Fran Colomb
London SE3
Interesting to hear that Rachel Cooke was instantly able to secure a table at the Sportsman in Seasalter. We normal mortals have to book at least three months ahead.
Martin Kane
Canterbury, Kent
and others besides:
http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gmg/op/sBR ... cat=Search
Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!
