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There are places we leave behind but never quite escape.

For Tracey Emin, Margate is one of those places.

The Kent seaside town is woven through Emin’s life and work so deeply that it is difficult to look at her art without, at some point, arriving back on the coast. Margate is childhood, adolescence, sex, family, loneliness and memory. It is the beach and the pier, the faded glamour of the British seaside and the less comfortable realities hidden behind it.

It is also a place that, like Emin herself, has been through difficult times and emerged changed.

Today, Margate is celebrated as an artistic and cultural destination. Visitors arrive for Turner Contemporary, independent galleries, studios, cafés and the town’s increasingly fashionable creative scene. Property prices have risen, Londoners have moved in and a new generation has discovered the attraction of living beside the sea.

But this is not the Margate that Emin remembers.

To understand Tracey Emin, it is worth understanding the Margate of her childhood — a town that had once been one of Britain’s great seaside resorts but was already beginning to lose its way.

When Margate was the place to go

It is easy to forget just how important the British seaside once was.

Before cheap flights and package holidays transported British families to Spain, Greece and the Mediterranean, the coast was where people went to escape. For Londoners, Margate offered sea air, sunshine, entertainment and the promise of something different.

The town had begun as a fishing community, but during the nineteenth century it was transformed by tourism. Steamships brought wealthy visitors from London, followed by the railway, which opened the seaside to a much wider audience.

By the Victorian era, Margate was thriving.

Hotels and boarding houses filled the streets. Pleasure boats operated from the harbour. Visitors came for the beach, the pier and the amusements. By the early twentieth century, the town had developed the ingredients of the classic British seaside holiday.

Dreamland became synonymous with Margate. The Winter Gardens, cinemas, bathing facilities, donkey rides, deckchairs and amusement attractions created a world designed around pleasure.

It was colourful, noisy and deliberately escapist.

But seaside towns are particularly vulnerable to changing fashions.

And Margate’s golden age would not last.

The seaside dream begins to fade

From the 1960s onwards, the British holiday began to change.

The package holiday offered something the traditional seaside resort could not: guaranteed sunshine, warmer seas and the excitement of going abroad.

The British coast began to lose its visitors.

Margate suffered badly.

The grand hotels became increasingly difficult to maintain. Boarding houses lost their customers. Large Victorian and Georgian buildings were divided into cheaper accommodation. The once-bustling high street began to lose its familiar names.

The physical decline of the town became impossible to ignore.

Empty shops appeared. Charity shops and discount stores became increasingly common. Attractions closed. Employment opportunities disappeared.

The closure of major employers added to the sense that something had been lost.

Margate was no longer the glamorous seaside destination of the Victorian imagination.

It had become a town struggling to find a new identity.

And it was into this Margate that Tracey Emin grew up.

A childhood beside the sea

Emin’s relationship with Margate is complicated because the town is inseparable from both happy and painful memories.

Her family ran a hotel, meaning that she experienced the town from within its tourist economy. But by the time of her childhood, that economy was changing.

The grand seaside dream had become something much more fragile.

In her memoir Strangeland, Emin writes about her childhood and adolescence with the same frankness that characterises her visual art. There is little romanticising of the past.

Her Margate is not simply sunshine and ice cream.

It is sex and shame. It is boredom and excitement. It is vulnerability and rebellion.

And perhaps this is why the town appears so powerfully in her work.

Emin has always been interested in the things people might prefer not to talk about. Her art turns private experience into public material. The places in which those experiences occurred therefore matter.

Margate matters.

The other side of the British seaside

One of Emin’s most revealing works in relation to Margate is Why I Never Became a Dancer.

The work recalls her teenage years and the humiliation and sexual judgement she experienced as a young woman in the town.

The title itself has a deceptively light quality. But beneath it lies something much darker.

The seaside becomes a stage.

There is the familiar Margate of entertainment and performance, but Emin turns that idea inside out. Instead of holidaymakers arriving for pleasure, we encounter the complicated world of adolescence, sexuality and vulnerability.

The work is deeply personal, yet it also says something about the seaside towns of Britain.

Behind the amusement arcades and brightly coloured attractions was another world — one of loneliness, economic hardship, teenage sexuality and social exclusion.

Emin simply refused to look away from it.

Photographing a town in decline

Emin’s photographs of Margate add another layer to this relationship.

They record a seaside town that has seen better days. Beach huts, buildings and familiar coastal spaces appear stripped of the romanticism often associated with the British seaside.

There is something melancholy about these images.

The seaside is supposed to represent happiness. It is where childhood memories are made. It is where families go for holidays.

But Emin’s Margate can feel empty.

The damaged and neglected landscape becomes almost a portrait of the artist herself — a record of a past that cannot simply be recovered.

This is one of the reasons Emin’s relationship with Margate feels so compelling. She doesn’t present the town as either beautiful or ugly.

She presents it as lived experience.

Brighton Rock and the lost seaside

Margate’s story is part of a much larger British story.

Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, set in another famous south-coast resort, captures the atmosphere of the seaside during its heyday. His Brighton is crowded with visitors, amusement arcades, hotels and bank-holiday excitement.

And Margate makes an appearance.

“The present from Margate on the mantelpiece his mother’d had; from one sea to another, a change of pier.”

It is a small reference, but a revealing one.

Brighton and Margate belonged to the same seaside culture. Both were destinations where Londoners could temporarily escape the city.

Brighton managed to reinvent itself more successfully, eventually developing into a city known for culture, nightlife, tourism and the creative industries.

Margate took longer.

Its decline was deeper and more painful.

But perhaps that is part of what makes its current revival so fascinating.

From decline to an artistic revival

There is an extraordinary irony in what happened next.

A town once struggling with empty shops and unemployment began to find a new identity through art.

In 2011, Turner Contemporary opened on Margate’s seafront.

The gallery was a major cultural investment and became one of the most important symbols of Margate’s regeneration.

Suddenly, contemporary art was bringing people back to the town.

Visitors who might once have travelled to Margate for the beach were now arriving to see exhibitions.

Artists began opening studios. Independent businesses followed. Cafés, galleries and creative spaces appeared.

Margate started to become fashionable again.

The town’s faded Victorian buildings, rather than simply being reminders of decline, became part of its appeal.

What had once looked like decay could now be described as character.

Emin comes home

Then, in 2017, Tracey Emin returned.

After decades living and working in London and becoming one of Britain’s best-known contemporary artists, Emin moved back to Margate.

There is something almost circular about the decision.

She had left the town that had shaped her, achieved international recognition, and then returned to the place where so many of her earliest experiences had taken place.

But this was not simply a nostalgic homecoming.

Emin began to invest her time and energy in the town’s future. She established a studio, supported emerging artists and became increasingly vocal about Margate’s architecture and heritage.

The woman who had once grown up in a struggling seaside resort was now in a position to help influence what it might become.

Margate becomes fashionable again

The transformation has not been without complications.

As artists and creative businesses moved into Margate, property became increasingly desirable. People priced out of London began looking towards the Kent coast.

The very qualities that once made Margate seem neglected — affordable buildings, old architecture, proximity to London — became attractive again.

There is an irony here.

The town is being rediscovered partly because of the things that survived its decline.

The old buildings. The seafront. The faded glamour.

The sense that Margate is somewhere slightly outside the mainstream.

For artists, that can be enormously attractive.

Emin and the idea of resilience

Perhaps this is why Tracey Emin’s return feels so significant.

There is a parallel between her story and the story of Margate.

Both have been underestimated.

Both have experienced periods of darkness.

Both have had to confront difficult histories rather than simply erase them.

Emin’s art transformed personal pain into something powerful and internationally recognised. Margate is attempting something similar on a much larger scale — transforming its history of decline into a new cultural identity.

Neither story is neat.

And perhaps it shouldn’t be.

Margate is not a perfect success story. Regeneration brings its own problems, particularly rising property prices and concerns about who can afford to remain in the town.

But change is happening.

The woman who put Margate on the map

Emin’s influence extends beyond the artworks that directly reference her childhood.

Her name brings attention.

When an internationally recognised artist chooses to live and work in Margate, it says something about the town.

When celebrities visit, when international media arrive and when galleries and studios open their doors, the perception of Margate changes.

The town becomes a destination not because it has forgotten its past, but because its past has become part of its identity.

And Emin is one of the people who understands that better than most.

She knows the Margate of the beach huts and boarding houses.

She knows the Margate of adolescence and difficult memories.

She knows the town before the galleries and cafés.

And now she knows the Margate that is trying to reinvent itself.

A personal connection that has never disappeared

There is something deeply moving about Emin’s continuing relationship with Margate.

She could have left it behind.

Instead, she returned.

Perhaps the reason is that places like Margate stay with us. They become part of the internal landscape.

For Emin, the town is more than a birthplace or childhood setting. It is part of the vocabulary of her art.

The sea, the pier, the hotels, the empty spaces and the memories all remain.

Even the decline matters.

Because without that decline, there might be no Margate in Emin’s work as we know it.

The town gave her difficult material.

She gave it a voice.

The Margate that Emin helped create

Today, visitors walking along Margate seafront encounter a town that is both familiar and completely different.

There are still remnants of the old seaside resort. The beach is still there. The sea is still there. The architecture still carries the marks of its Victorian and twentieth-century past.

But alongside it is something new.

Contemporary art.

Independent businesses.

Studios.

Cafés.

A new generation of residents.

And, at the centre of this transformation, the remarkable fact that one of Britain’s most famous artists has chosen to come home.

Tracey Emin and Margate are therefore bound together by more than geography.

The town shaped the artist.

The artist has, in turn, helped reshape the way the world sees the town.

The sea is still there

Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand the relationship between Tracey Emin and Margate.

The town has changed.

Emin has changed.

But the sea remains.

The same coastline that once brought Victorian holidaymakers from London is still there. The same horizon that watched the town flourish and decline now looks out over a Margate that is trying once again to reinvent itself.

For Emin, the journey has been equally remarkable.

From a difficult childhood in a declining seaside resort to international fame, from leaving Margate to returning home, her life has repeatedly come back to the place where it began.

Margate gave Tracey Emin some of the rawest material of her life.

And Emin, perhaps more than any other contemporary artist, has shown that there can be art in the difficult places — beauty in decay, meaning in memory and possibility in a town that once seemed to have lost its way.

Margate is no longer simply the place Tracey Emin came from.

It has become part of the story of where she chose to come back to.

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