Rudi Minto de Wijs is a curator and writer whose work spans contemporary art, music, and community projects that champion inclusivity and celebrate diasporic culture. He is currently Head of Curation at Jumbi Peckham. Based in Margate, he landed there almost by accident after coming for a day trip.
Play football: Hartsdown Park, Margate F.C.
Watch football: Barnacles
Eat: Sargasso, Dive, Picnic Deli
Drink: The Shakespeare
Visit: Carl Freedman Gallery, Quench
Margate has always been a place defined as much by the narratives projected onto it as by its own quiet, insistent realities. Some call it Shoreditch-on-Sea, a convenient but, in my opinion, lazy shorthand for what happens when London’s cultural tide rolls in and out (and then out again) and leaves behind the driftwood of ex-urbanites littered amongst the sandy locals. But spend more than a weekend here, and one realises how reductive that label is. Margate is softer than that. Slower, too. A town where the edges blur in the best possible way: between locals and newcomers, between work and leisure, between the desire to escape and the urge to belong. I think.
My own routine here is testament to that. A Saturday afternoon wandering between Sargasso’s tables overlooking the harbour, where plates of anchovy toast, oysters from a mile away and crisp, briny wines remind you how much the sea shapes everything. Down the harbour arm, Dive is tucked into an unassuming corner serving tacos so good they stop you mid-sentence. Picnic Deli is my other standby: somewhere to pick up bread, local cheese, something sweet, and one of the best focaccia sandwiches I’ve ever had (the chicken caesar is especially delightful). Each place feels open-armed, unhurried. Like Margate itself.
Margate has been more recently known as a stronghold for artists and smaller galleries, Carl Freedman Gallery and Quench are two of my faves. This weekend, the opening of Lola Stong Brett’s new show. The space was full of familiar faces, plastic cups of wine in hand, and Lola’s considered and arresting work lit up the room.
But if food offers a taste of this softer life, to me the weekly football is where you see its spirit most clearly. Every week, a rotating cast of locals, Londoners, and in-betweeners gather for a game of five-a-side organised via a WhatsApp group poignantly named ‘Low Expectations’. The group is mixed ability and refreshingly ego-free, more concerned with having a laugh than keeping score. In July, we’re playing to raise funds for Alzheimer’s UK, just the latest in a long list of community efforts this crew has rallied behind. There’s something grounding about it and weirdly, for me anyway, healing. We play on the astroturf at Hartsdown Park, the home of Margate Football Club, an old non-league ground with more stories than seats. Under the floodlights, there’s a particular kind of magic.
The clatter of moulds on astroturf. The small rituals of stretch, pass, moan, repeat. The sense that no matter how long you’ve been here, a decade or a month, you’re welcome on the pitch.
Margate’s football scene feels, to me, like a microcosm of the town itself. A place where people have come to recalibrate. To swap out the hard edges of the city for something gentler and more human. In the end, the clichés about Margate, dropout haven, creative refuge, miss the point. It isn’t about leaving one life behind so much as finding a place where you can live it differently. Where you can still play hard, but at your own pace. Where you can eat well, laugh often, and feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself.
After the final whistle, the rituals continue. In winter, it’s pints at The Shakespeare, everyone crammed into the warm wood of the front bar, nursing tired legs and replaying goals that probably looked better in our heads. Come summer, the evening drifts down to the sea, a quick pint, then a swim under a sherbet sky. This week, conscious of cramming in more football related rattle for this piece, we end up at The Flamingo Arcade, still in our kit, playing the broken penalty shootout machine that never quite registers. The mechanical goalkeeper is as still as the cloudless sky. 1990’s style, with a fag in his mouth, probably. It’s a small, perfect punctuation to the week and proof that here, the goals can be the same but the targets can often be a bit easier to hit.
To me, a kickabout on a darkening evening, punctuated by jokes and small acts of solidarity, might be the truest representation of what Margate is becoming: not just a destination, but a community again, one that knows the value of a slower game after years of fast-paced and unrewarding Brexit ball.
