Tagungsort Grand Hotel Heiligendamm

verty and crime, and the seaside can appear an
unappealing option for a family holiday. By the
end of the 20th century some media reports
neously,
to pronounce the end of the English
seaside holiday.
Margate Old Town Laundrette
A town like Margate suffered from this nationwide
decline, but this was exacerbated by a
sharp local decline. In the Old Town there
were proposals to demolish the historic town
of Margate, replacing it in the 1970s with car
parking and new facilities. Work began in Cecil
Square but fortunately never spread to the
Old Town. However, much of the historic
buildings and the businesses in the Old Town
were closed and neglected.
Margate Town centre shops
There was also a profound problem in Margate
with its shops – over a quarter are closed,
indication of the impact of the opening of a
new large shopping centre outside the town,
meaning that national chains have closed their
shops in the town and opened large premises
at Westwood Cross where people can enjoy
free parking.
All this decline and press stories about an
deterred many people from visiting this wonderful
and very important resort.
At the beginning of the 21st century the English
Tourism Council’s report entitled Sea
Changes Creating world-class resorts in England
(2001) pointed to ways in which resorts
could try to tempt back visitors:
‘The English resort determined to similarly
reinvent itself and evolve into a modern
successful business will need to combine the
original strengths that made it appealing and
which differentiated it in that era (the sea, the
beach, promenades, the sea air etc), along
with new or evolved aspects which will again
give it some form of differentiation. The successful
resort will need to differentiate not
only from its peer resorts, but from the spectrum
of other leisure and tourism experiences
with which it is competing both domestically
and abroad.’
To arrest the decline and to create a new image
for Margate the local council and the town
-
ative
was to use art as a driver for regeneration.
Seaside Postcards
This was the most obvious manifestation of
art at the seaside for most of the 20th century,
but for over a century the seaside has been
attracting artists to paint and in some places
strong, artists colonies founded.
St Ives Tate Gallery
The attraction of its light, landscape and
quaint streets, brought artists as diverse as
Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach and Ben
Nicholson to St Ives, leading to the conversion
of many working buildings into studios
and cementing the town’s position as the preeminent
art colony in England. In June 1993
a new gallery, a branch of the Tate Gallery in
London, opened and still attracts substantial
numbers of visitors, but it also acts as the focal
point of a thriving local community and
Anthony Gormley’s Another Place
As well as artistic communities in a number
of towns, artists have been drawn to create
works of art at the seaside. Anthony Gormley
created Another Place, which consists of 100
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