Dreamland

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire

The ring of fire

So sang the great Johnny Cash, although he wasn't talking about the Scenic Railway admittedly.
Margate is a town where every anachronism has been gripped with two hands and clung to as some kind of sacred totem of a time when it wasn't just an irrelevancy and a parking lot for the desperate.
It's a place of grey faded pointlessness, a festival of dull rutting people, drinking to oblivion and loitering under lurid lights, observed by a passive, patient sea, serenaded by the squawks and pings and pongs of a thousand gibbering arcade machines.

So much of Margate is a study in total desolation. Standing in that small atrium at the rear of Arlington House, feeling the wind whip around you, surrounded by empty, boarded up shops on every side, you suddenly feel transported to a post-apocalyptic world of isolation and despair.

All in all, THAT is the character of Margate for young people today. Not "taking the waters", having fun on roller-coasters, or sitting about and watching cockneys fight on the seafront. Or dodging the mods and rockers with a parka and a leather jacket just in case. Those days are gone.

What we need to preserve is this unremitting feeling of dull ambitionless torpor, nowhere better illustrated by that most elephantine of all white elephants, Dreamland.

When your town is embodied by a closed rollercoaster, it might just be time for change. The hysteria about the admittedly suspicious fire belies a deep keynote of cultural retardation. The same people who decry this unfortunate fire as a slap in the face for Margate, are those who'll look sniffily at the Turner Centre, or huff and walk past the gallery space in the High Street grumbling about a waste of money.

The oddity of Margate is that it's the only vacuum in the world capable of sustaining a fire. Multiple fires in fact. Cheers to the perpetrator. He may be a huge spiv, but he's clearly a town planner ahead of his time.