When it comes to the fortunes of faded English seaside towns, Margate is a rare success story. It’s been dubbed Hackney-by-sea and last year Time Out declared it home to one of the world’s coolest streets.
Thanks in part to the presence of the Turner Contemporary and its most famous resident, Dame Tracey Emin, the town is also a thriving hub of British art. In fact, only last weekend the Turner Prize winner posed for a series of photographs in the town with her friend Madonna who posted pictures of her visit, her second in three months, on her Instagram profile to her 20 million followers. The American star praised Emin’s residency programme for artists in Margate.
Factor in plenty of affordable housing and studio space, myriad galleries, a bustling calendar of events and a thriving nearby synagogue and it is perhaps no surprise that Jewish artists are among those behind the renaissance of a town that has been a holiday destination since the 18th century.
“Everybody seems to love it here,” says Katie Blythe, 41, an artist and member of Thanet and District Reform Synagogue in Ramsgate, five miles down the A255.
“It’s all very creative, sometimes slightly chaotic but there’s an interesting energy that can be quite exciting and make you feel like part of something that’s growing and vibrant.”
Figurehead: Margate resident Tracey Emin has supported British Friends of the Art Museums of IsraelGetty Images
Blythe’s artistic practice is currently focused on stone carvings. Her latest project is a fragment of carving based on Lot’s wife using material salvaged from Canterbury Cathedral’s stone yard. “I like the idea of making Jewish art from stones used from Canterbury Cathedral,” she says. “I made one piece based on the stone that Moses brought down [bearing the Ten Commandments].”
Like many others in Margate, Blythe wears several hats. “It’s a real gig economy because people have all different types of jobs,” she says. She has her own studio but when she’s not creating, she’s either researching the area’s Jewish heritage for a university project, running walking tours on that subject or working on community projects, including at the shul.
She “performs” her tours in an Anglo-Yiddish style. “Like a boarding house balabusta. So, lots of mentions of ‘shlepping’ and ‘oy veys’ but also lots of fish and chips and cups of tea,” she laughs.
The region’s most famous Jewish son is Sir Moses Montefiore, the financier and philanthropist who fought for Jewish rights worldwide. But he’s only part of its Jewish history. Blythe’s tours tell the stories of those who lived here, as well as the many others who passed through.
“There was always a transient population here, and that didn’t just include the Jews,” she says. “This was an area that was very focused on tourism.”
Before the advent of cheap overseas holidays, Margate was a thriving seaside resort – and a firm favourite with British Jews. Now a new strictly kosher hotel, Unico Hotel, along the seafront is evidence that those days are back – with a vengeance.
“There are now many more Jewish people here than there were when I first moved to the area,” says Blythe. “But I have noticed that many of them come from north London where they don’t have to try to be Jewish. When they first came to Margate, maybe it was because they wanted to get away from that, a bit.
“But then, in many cases, they have children and their kids aren’t learning about their heritage and their background in school, which is perhaps why Ramsgate shul has more and more members. Were they still in London, maybe these Margate residents would be going to synagogue and or sending their kids to cheder. But now they actively seek out that kind of Jewish life. We all look out for each other and have like a hundred WhatsApp groups,” she says.
At the heart of Margate’s Cliftonville suburb is North Down Road, a buzzing high street that is home to a string of independent shops, galleries, bars and restaurants. Among them is a branch of The Good Egg, a Jewish and Israeli-inspired café. It does the “best sabich outside of Tel Aviv”, according to Lior Locher.
Originally from Germany but in the UK for the past 11 years, Locher has been living in Margate for 14 months. As a perfect example of the town’s gig economy, Locher, who is non-binary, has a part-time job to enable their artistic lifestyle.
"Chaotic energy": Katie Blythe[Missing Credit]
“I’d been coming here for art openings and events and things for about two, three years,” says Locher, adding that it was through these visits that the 47-year-old formed close friendships and eventually decided to relocate from Brighton.
“It feels like a small town but with an international artsy kind of vibe, which is a really unique combination, and it’s queer-friendly too. Brighton does have an art scene, but it’s not quite like here,” says the artist who works with collage, ceramics and mixed media, and also writes and performs.
“Here, you might meet someone one year while they’re exhibiting in an ice-cream shop and then they get into TKE Studios [Emin’s studio],” says Locher, adding that another local artist whose work was spotted on social media by Emin – who has supported the British Friends of the Art Museums of Israel and has work held in private Israeli collections – now shows at Frieze.
Another major venue is the Carl Freedman Gallery, where A-listers such as Madonna and Sharon Stone have been spotted. “Because it’s so small, it is fairly permeable, so people do get discovered and picked up. The top end of the art scene here is properly global,” Locher says.
Bruno Grad was selected for the inaugural Jewish Renaissance Artist Development Programme last year. Based at the Resort studios in Cliftonville, his work “explores the possibility of a distinctively religious artistic endeavour within the idiom of contemporary art”. Grad, 38, who grew up in a secular household in Canterbury, today wears a kippah and tzitzit.
His art and religion are in “dialogue” with each other, he says. “They’re deeply entwined, both in terms of the way I think about them as a practice and also subject matter,” he says.
He first moved to Margate about 12 years ago when “it was on the cusp of starting to change and become more of a destination for people leaving London and young families were moving in,” he says.
His current and second stint started two and a half years ago. “Margate is a wonderful place to be an artist especially one who’s emerging. There’s less economic pressure than you get in London, and the capital city can also feel quite overwhelming when you’re trying to do something that could be described as precarious.”
Being in Margate gives artists “mental space and time to find out what it is you’re doing and nurture those little germinating seedlings. It’s a good place for that and it’s unusual in the sense that it’s like a satellite of London,” he says. “You get the art crowd coming here.”
Margate's sea front[Missing Credit]
Less happily, he has found it a difficult place to be visibly Jewish, and Grad will soon be leaving Margate for London where he plans to get married and put down roots. The town has a vocal pro-Palestinian contingent, which has support from the artistic community. “I’ve experienced quite a lot of open hostility, of aggression. I’ve been harassed on the street and been called a baby killer. When you’re a visibly religious Jew, people make political assumptions about you. They think it means you’re far-right,” he says. However, he has also been the victim of anti-Jewish racism in London, where he now spends most of his weekends. “Someone went for me with a knife outside synagogue,” he says. He was, thank goodness, physically unharmed but the attack has taken its toll.
“I think it has made me less resilient to the things I experience here,” he says. “Because it’s a small town, it feels, in a way, harder to plough on.”
It is not only visual artists who have made Margate their home. Another creative who relocated here is professional cellist, composer and producer Francesca Ter-Berg. Originally from Hackney, she made the move in 2019.
It was the sea that originally drew the musician, who specialises in klezmer and Yiddish music, to Kent. “The light down here is so beautiful, even when the weather’s terrible,” Ter-Berg, 40, says. “I get very overwhelmed in the city, and wanted to find somewhere that had its own artistic and communal identity.”
Musical presence: Francesca Ter-Berg (Credit: Lisa Valder Photography)[Missing Credit]
At first the move felt “scary” but she soon met people, settled in and even learnt about the area’s Jewish history. Then, during the pandemic, she stumbled across a shul in Cliftonville and, intrigued, found a way in. “I had experience working with old synagogues and playing music in them so I had my spiel ready,” she says. Eventually she found a contact for the Margate Hebrew Congregation, only to discover there were plans to put the building up for auction. Still, she arranged to visit – and was blown away when she did. “It’s a beautiful building,” she says. “I felt this really strong emotional feeling.”
What followed could be described as unlikely. With the support of three other women, she spearheaded the campaign to save the shul. “Everyone got on board, it was great,” she says. “We only had about five weeks but we found an anonymous donor who bought it.”
After a considerable revamp – though much of the original interior remains intact – the premises today are now home to Ark, which describes itself as “Cliftonville’s cultural space”. The venue stages music and theatre productions, art exhibitions and hires the premises out for parties and celebrations.
“It’s not JW3,” says Ark director Jan Ryan, “but the two criteria of our donor were that, first, the centre was for everybody in the community and, second, that it must respect and celebrate the Jewish heritage of the building.”
In the autumn of 2024, Ter-Berg, whose work involves a lot of national and international travel, organised KlezMargate at the venue and it proved a huge success.
Work by Jewish artists, including Blythe, has been exhibited at the centre and some of the events have a distinctly Jewish flavour. But, says the website, its overarching aim is to reflect and celebrate “the diverse roots and identities of all those who call Cliftonville home”.
That has sometimes been “challenging,” says Ryan, notably when they came under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists to fly the Palestinian flag. “My attitude is very much, we don’t do flags, we don’t do statements. We programme good work – that’s how we show our politics.”
The Ark “has acted as a sort of magnet for people who are Jewish,” she says. “Their partners might not be Jewish, they might not be religious, they might be half-Jewish, but they really want to find a way of celebrating that culture in a non-traditional way.
“For me it’s really important that we have that Jewish thread running through what we do and at the moment I feel like I’m custodian
of that.”
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