Art and murder in Margate: how Eliot, Turner and Emin put one town back on the map

Creativity has revived this ailing seaside town’s fortunes in the most imaginative of ways, finds Bernadette Fallon

Margate’s unbeatable skies (Rob Wilson Jnr)

On Margate Sands/I can connect/Nothing with nothing

It might not get you racing to Margate – and TS Eliot was recovering from a mental breakdown when he wrote it, in a beach shelter, overlooking the sea. But the lines went on to become part of The Waste Land, one of the 20th century’s most famous poems.

Not that Margate cared what he thought. It had been rocking since the 1800s, a Victorian seaside getaway that gave the world its first beach deckchairs, donkey rides, and those spectacular Thanet skies, described by the artist JMW Turner as the “loveliest in all Europe”.