Whitstable, Margate, Ramsgate and… Newington? Inside the rebrand of a “left behind” Kent suburb
As part of their series on Britain’s lost spaces and amid a patchwork of gentrification and coastal decline, the NewStatesman spoke to residents of Newington about reclaiming public spaces to bolster their local identity – and working with Lantern in the process.
Written by Anoosh Chakelian
Originally published in the NewStatesman
Trace your finger along a map of the Kent coast, and certain names jump out.
The oyster capital of Whitstable, long popular with day-trippers and now a place of rising house prices and Grand Designs-style creations along the seafront.
Artsy Margate, where the Turner Contemporary gallery overlooks atmospheric bistros serving small plates on the harbour arm – the restored pleasure park of Dreamland commodifying traditional English seaside revelry across the bay.
There is the genteel Victorian charm in the tearooms and beach huts lining the sandy beaches of Broadstairs; hotchpotch Ramsgate’s junk shops, smugglers’ caves, and warren of air raid tunnels; the retirement favourite Deal; and the moody music video and photoshoot haunt of Dungeness: speckled with industrial detritus and (disputably) Britain’s only desert.
All stereotypes, of course, perpetuated variously by local tourist boards, estate agents and people down from London (“DFLs”).
Such reputations can attract visitors, investment and excitement to the area, yet local experiences tend to be erased in the process – and coastal deprivation hidden from view.
Thanet, home to Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate, is the most deprived local authority in Kent. It has the highest rate of youth unemployment in the south-east. Five of its neighbourhoods in the top 10 per cent of England’s most deprived wards, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation, are within a four-mile radius of each other.
All five – Newington, Northwood, Eastcliff, Dane Valley and Cliftonville West – also rank in the top 10 per cent of places lacking public assets and local spaces, according to a new “Community Needs Index” created last year by the Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) with Local Trust. This puts them on a list of 225 “left behind” English neighbourhoods.
Newington is a residential estate of solid 1950s houses with gardens, originally built for local coal miners and their families. The rows of neat houses criss-cross between large green stretches of open grassland, playing fields and parks.
Historically, it has suffered from a “terrible reputation”, admits Cara Thorpe, who was born and bred in Newington and has managed the local community centre for two years. “It was quite a rough area, there were gangs on the estate terrorising neighbours, burnt-out and stolen cars, and problems with drugs.”
Thieves would stretch wire from the roundabout to the pavement in order to trip motorbikes up and steal them. Thorpe herself admits to “blowing up a postbox” as a teenager, making full use of the firecrackers she and her fellow pupils were allowed to buy in France during school trips across the Channel. “We still don’t have a postbox here now,” she grins, apologetically.
When Thorpe was raising her own children here, they were beaten up numerous times when out alone – particularly her son who attended the local grammar school and would try and disguise his uniform (Kent maintains more grammar schools than any other English county).
Newington’s only pub, the Cherry Orchard, closed in 2011, bus services are limited, and the main local shops are chippies and off-licences.
“We are limited here,” says Thorpe. “We’re looked down on as the poor relation of Thanet. We’re part of Ramsgate though you wouldn’t know it – we get forgotten and neglected. It’s all about making the harbour look pretty. Don’t get me wrong, the harbour does look nice, but all the investment goes down to the seafront, and down in the town.”
Nearby Margate is one of 101 towns shortlisted for up to £25m of the government’s Towns Fund, and Ramsgate has been awarded £1.1m from the High Streets Heritage programme. And after 22 years of sitting derelict, the site of the Pleasurama funfair that burned down in 1998 is finally undergoing multi-million-pound development work on Ramsgate esplanade.
Now, however, lifelong residents such as Cara Thorpe are taking their area back into their own hands.
The estate was awarded £1m by the then Big Lottery Fund in 2014, which has opened up money for residents to spend on their own projects in a group called Newington Big Local. Even before then, residents tell me, their home had been visibly transforming.
Poor-quality maisonette housing in Newington town centre was replaced in the early 2010s at the behest of veteran Newington representative Richard Nicholson – who was then its Thanet District councillor and now chairs Newington Community Association.
Newington Big Local commissioned the brand agency Lantern in 2017 to design logos and visuals to rebrand the neighbourhood. “Often community projects have a drawing competition for a logo and never change it – we wanted something professional, so that people see it and know it’s us, because the residents deserve it,” says Thorpe.
It has taken years for Newington’s residents to reclaim their identity.
“When I started taking my daughter to the new majorettes club at the community centre that started in 2015, I used to sit outside and wait for her without speaking to anyone,” says NHS healthcare assistant Jenny Philpott, a Newington resident since childhood, whose father was a miner. “I was embarrassed.”
She felt guarded, having spent the Eighties and early Nineties avoiding the dangers of the area, ferrying her children around by car, and complaining to police about syringes being chucked into her garden by drug users in the alley outside.
Now her daughter Hayley Philpott is a mother herself whose 11-year-old is involved in every local activity going (“she’d camp outside the community centre if she could!”), and she allows her own children to stay out after school without worrying. “With mum, she used to say: ‘Why aren’t you home by five?’ Now, I just think, ‘ah, they’ll come back when they’re hungry’.”
“There’s so much more going on here now,” adds Jenny. “We’ve grabbed our home back but it takes a while to reverberate through. People are suspicious of nosey neighbours – actually it’s community spirit, and makes the place safer.”