Places, like property prices, go up and down. Margate, in the most northerly corner of Kent, is just beginning the uncertain journey upwards again. The county’s largest resort, it has acres of ribbed brown sand and a harbour enclosed by a pier, ending in a lighthouse.
Margate thrived when Turner painted there, and London workers arrived by daily packet for a waft of ozone, cockles and jellied eels. There are tall terraced houses in Regency stucco and Georgian brick, and knapped-flint cottages; a gloriously kitsch Winter Gardens, a shell grotto and the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, sponsored by George III. There is also the wreckage of mass tourism — bingo, Butlins, arcades, the boarded-up wastes of Dreamland Fun Park and a defunct Lido and Scenic Railway. The Tate-backed Turner Gallery was a regeneration scheme that stalled. Unemployment, demolition, drugs, crime, asylum seekers and a Migrant Relief Centre are here. By south-eastern standards, houses are still pretty cheap. Tracey Emin is Margate’s only success story.
This is where that strange, magical organisation Artangel comes in. It aims to make art outside the gallery, matching up artists, contexts and audiences to get something relevant, democratic and unmediated. For Margate, it commissioned Penny Woolcock, a filmmaker with a social conscience. With Artangel’s co-directors, Michael Morris and James Lingwood, she came here and found herself thinking of the Old Testament story, the flight of the children of Israel out of Egypt. Over four years, with funding from various art charities, Kent County Council, Channel 4 and elsewhere, hundreds of local people were co-opted to become the actors, singers, musicians, technicians, painters and helpers needed for The Margate Exodus. Antony Gormley’s contribution was ‘Waste Man’, an 80-ft sculpture of recycled rubbish (a metaphor for the biblical pillar of fire, a Golden Calf), built by the people of Margate and burned for the people, a public spectacle on camera.
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