The Seaside Town They Forgot To Bomb

In these days of austerity and environmental concerns, jetting off to far-flung and exotic destinations is less on the cards than perhaps it was a few years ago. Ash clouds, strikes, natural disasters and travel companies going bust all over the place are perhaps a sign that it's time to start exploring the delights on offer on our own, accessible, British doorstep.

Yes, delights. And Margate.

I've visited quite a few seaside towns over the past couple of years. I've been on a sort of accidental tour of them, in fact, sometimes intentionally, and at other times to watch football. Each visit has delivered its own little anecdotes and a not inconsiderable amount of rock for family and friends who fall on such multi-E-numbered candy not wholly with a sense of irony. I got engaged in Blackpool, then caught in a hailstorm the same day... in June. In Torquay I encountered a racist taxi-driver ("We have taxi drivers here from Bradford - they come down with monkeys still on their backs") who was a handy warm-up act for the racists who plagued the football match he was driving us to, but on the upside I won a meerkat playing darts. None of these, however, was a match for Margate.

I last visited Margate in January for a "team-building weekend". My five colleagues and I formed one of only two groups of guests in the guesthouse we were staying in, the other being two elderly sisters down for a funeral. Dinner was served at 7 every night by a stony-faced woman who thought catering for vegetarins meant taking the lump of meat off the plate, and gave us a choice of two desserts: lemon freeze cake (whatever that is) and fruit salad out of a tin. The "swimming pool" was no more than a large bath, but we couldn't use it anyway as it was closed for "maintenance", so we spent the nights driving up and down the seafront playing loud music and wrecking the suspension on our minibus.

So I was intrigued to see the "real" Margate. From the Visit Thanet website it looked potentially promising. The website gives no less than three pages of "attractions" one can visit, admittedly only two of which actually seem to be IN Margate, and many of which seem to involve Mini Golf, but we were only going for a day, so how many attractions would we need?

Bristling with excitement - well, OK, bristling with indifference, but let's suspend our disbelief for a while - we pulled into the first carpark we found, and consequently pulled into Dreamland. Now according to Wiki Dreamland actually closed in 2005, which would perhaps explain why what was effectively a piece of wasteland behind a bingo hall didn't look very inviting. What apparently used to house one of the world's oldest rollercoasters (the skeleton of it is still there and looked quite haunting) is now home to a very temporary and bleak-looking fairground complete with second-rate dodgems and poor-quality, unwinnable cuddly toys and one of those terrifying-looking things that whizzes you from side to side whist dangling precariously 60-odd feet above the ground. My nephew was successfully steered away from indluging in Dreamland's pleasures by his dad pointing to one of the ride hands, staring into the distance and smoking somewhat desolately next to his empty ride. "You see the man there? He's the man who's job it is to make the rides work. He's also in charge of putting them together." [Pause]. "Do you still want to go on anything?"

But there are plenty of other things to do in Margate...right? Right. If your idea of a good time is feeding 2p after 2p into a slot machine and winning 5 or 6 more 2ps for every 20 you feed in, then there are hours of fun in store for you in Margate. We counted no less than 3 arcades where you can while away the day participating in this very activity. And, not ones to leave a task unfinished, we diligently stayed there until every single coin had gone, though we did have two plastic keyrings to show for our efforts. From the cosy confines of the arcade we watched as people blew past us, swept along by the howling gale with their inside-out umbrellas in front of them. On the beach, a solitary intrepid child was trying - without much success, it must be said - to operate one of the swingboats alone. The bouncy castle lay deflated and sad-looking, like some unfortunate character in some children's film. A makeshift stage optimistically promising live music sat rain-lashed and abandoned next to a hot dog stall which seemed to be doing an inexplicably roaring trade.

Deciding that perhaps we had exhausted the delights Margate can offer on a typically wet and windswept bank holiday, we popped into the sweet shop on the way back to Dreamland to buy some proper English Seaside Rock for some friends. We found some immediately. Trouble is, it says "Made in Blackpool" on it.

The English Seaside. Once you've been, why would you ever choose to go abroad again?