Meet Marge from Margate – our new cactus.
I don’t usually write about things not related to design, but because my fiancé and I have decided to stop drinking and I’ve stopped doing freelance… We’re going to start exploring new places. So I’ve decided to add this topic to my blog. The first stop on our map was Margate in Kent.
Margate is definitely not what I expected. After watching ‘Mr. Turner’ I thought Margate would be this lovely little Victorian port… How wrong I was. To sum it up in three words: loud, dirty and smelly. Now I know ports are usually bustling with people and tend to have a never wavering smell of fish, but this was something different. Not much has remained of the Victorian ambience.
We started off going to Turner Contemporary and that was quite nice… I’m not sure Turner would’ve been happy with the very modern building, but the artwork was pleasing to the eye. The organisation was founded in 2001 and opened in 2011. It is built on the same site where Turner stayed when visiting the town. Admission to the gallery is free. The main exhibition on while we were there was about the centrality of the circle in art. It features more than 100 works – from 3000BC to the present day – Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle brings together artworks and artefacts that reflect a vast range of themes and ideas from roundness, rotation and visual perception to wonderment and cycles of time. The exhibition encompasses sculpture, film, painting, design, installation, performance and photography, with works by leading historical and contemporary artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, JMW Turner, Theaster Gates, Rebecca Horn, David Shrigley and Bridget Riley.
At the beach, we did a bit of sunbathing and I collected some stones (hopefully they’re some form of chalk and not dried bird poo). A new idea of mine is to collect stones from every new place we go to and add them into one of my cactuses. The cactus is then named after the place we’ve been to.
At around 5pm we decided to go and have some dinner. My fiance spent about 15 minutes looking through websites of local restaurants and he came across The Ambrette – which received Margate’s first ever Michelin recommendation in 2010. The food was amazing. An Indian-inspired menu including influences from other global cuisines, such as French and South East Asian, although many of the ingredients are local to Margate. I really recommend it and even if we won’t be going back to Margates beach – we will definitely come back to the Ambrette for a special occasion.
