BLUE by Rebecca

fav artwork here

Editor’s Letter I have always lived by the sea and cannot imagine ever not. In my first year of university in Brighton I met Joe, my partner. He’s from Leeds and whenever we’d go to visit his family I would be so confused about being inland. This may sound silly, but when you’ve always known that if you’re looking at the sea, that nor th is behind you, being inland and not knowing which way is up or down its quite jarring. My inner compass was lost. I think once you live a cer tain number of years by the sea, you’ll always miss it being just around the corner ; even Joe says that he can’t imagine being anywhere else.

least someone you know and if not, you might make a friend while you’re out. I have seen this in Folkestone and Brighton and it’s such a special thing. The towns I have lived in are both very creative, but Folkestone was not always, and I feel the towns creativity and mine have grown together. With the first Triennial being just as I went to secondary school and me mainly choosing ar t subjects.

I know not everyone has the same outlook as me of the regeneration going on in seaside towns. I went to a comprehensive school and lots of my friends did not understand nor care about the artwork going up in Folkestone. I don’t think I will ever fully understand how to live away from the sea. What do people do? Want to meet friends, meet at the beach? Walk, beach? Sad, beach. Happy, beach. What do

people do when they move away from the seaside? Where do they go to forget their woes and feel at peace? As you can tell I feel a cer tain way towards seaside towns and so when it came to my final major project at university how could I not choose to dedicate a whole magazine to them.

It’s not only the seaside that I love, it’s the towns that are along it. They harbour such a community. Walking around you’ll always see at

Rain on an Attic Room Window by Theo Cross

Heavy rain on an attic room window. The morning sun. Not burning your tongue on a cup of hot coffee. The smell of winter. The smell of winter at night. A solitary cumulo-nimbus, midday on the summer solstice. The murmuration on the right hand side of Brighton Palace pier. Palm trees in England. Girls in airports. Hearing a song say what a poem never could. Then never hearing that mystic hymn again. Showing your nephew how to skip stones on a sea set like amber. Watching him instead drop boulders and create tidal waves. Picking up a single grain of sand, and finding a world of glittering hands there. Being stroked then, and stirring, and waking up to rain on an attic room window.

Performing Arts by the Sea with Jacob Bray

Jacob Bray is a Performance Artist, Contempory Dancer and Choreographer based in Folkestone. Bray studied at the University of Chichester achieving a BA in Dance, this is where he discovered a fondness for nightlife culture and created a chorgraphy style which was loud and theatrical. Staying on at Chischester to study a MA in Performance Dance, this is where Bray worked with international choreographers in five nations, touring across the UK, Norway and Slovakia. After this, Shades of Bray was founded through the GradLab scheme and he choregraphed ‘Head over Heels’ at Resolution at The Place in London 2016. Since then, Shades of Bray has been Jacobs company name that he has continued to use through the years.

Do you feel a strong performing arts presence in Folkestone?

There is definitely a performing arts presence in Folkestone but I don’t know if I would describe it as strong. I’m also not sure that is a problem though. We have an incredible network of artists in Folkestone who work in a huge array of disciplines. It’s exciting to be a part of this, we collaborate ideas and grow together.

Growing up what got you into dance? Did Folkestone have an influence on you?

My first experience in dance was when I was around 6 years old. My cousin who was around 13 at the time used to teach me routines she learned at her dance school. We would put on funny little performances and my mum would try to convince me to enter dance school, to no avail. At secondary school dance entered my life again and became a major creative outlet for me. I was shy and choreography was a way for me to speak out. Folkestone has had more of an influence on my work as I have grown older and can respect the relationship between experience and place. Folkestone is full of people I love and its pavements are strewn with memories of childhood and adulthood, joy and pain, these inform my work as they really form the foundation of my disposition.

After graduating what made you come back and start up Shades of Bray?

After graduating I formed Shades of Bray through a project called GradLab which is based at The Point in Eastleigh. At the same time I was in the process of deciding whether I wanted to stay in Folkestone or move potentially to London or another creatively influential city. I chose to stay in Folkestone, in honesty, for mostly practical reasons. It is much cheaper to live here, it enables me to have more time to focus on choreography and my career. Only through staying here I have realised the fruitfulness in this decision. I am not so obsessed with my work being about ‘art for business’ or just ticking boxes, I can make work that is authentic and say exactly what I want it to, about a place I know and love. My work can comment on social and political issues regarding the town as I am a part of them.

How did lockdown effect your work and ability to be creative?

Lockdown presented most artists with difficulties however I think it is safe to say that dance and performance was one of the industries worst hit. I’m not sure if this was the right decision (who is ever sure?) but I haven’t made any work since the beginning of the first lockdown. I was concerned about authenticity and now the dust is beginning to settle I think lockdown is something that I can comment on in my work. Only now I have the chance to look back and can understand what has just happened. During lockdown, like a lot of people, I was struggling just to keep my head above the water and think any work I made in that time could have been thwarted.

Watch Shades of Bray’s next performance at the Quarter House, Folkestone. Friday 25th June Saturday 26th June

Homegrown in Folkestone by Eleanor Townley

My first memory is in Boots in Folkestone. Nothing particularly special happened there, but every time I step into that shop, I feel a huge sense of nostalgia. In my mind, I am transported back to the mid 90s to when I was a baby. This is because my mum, Clare, used to shop there often and it is one of the few remaining shops on Folkestone High Street. Although a lot has changed in Folkestone, Boots’ fluorescent lighting is here to stay, for now. This piece is not a dedication to Boots (although

I do love Boots. Thank you Clubcard points.) This is about the transformation of Folkestone in the past twenty-five years (the length of my life) and how my mother and I fit into that. My mum owns a café called Mermaids located between Folkestone and Sandgate. It is the epitome of a seaside café, with some modern twists, vegan hot dogs anyone? She started Mermaids with her friend Sarah, when I was three years old. It has been a constant in my life and when I hear that beautiful sound of coffee

grinding, I know I am home. Folkestone has been my hometown since birth, bar three years at university in Norwich. It is a special place. Like so many others, I felt fully ready to leave home when I turned eighteen, but then when I left, I missed it immensely and immediately. I have seen this time and time again with Folkestone. It has such a pull on people, and people rarely leave for long before they are charmed back. I could never quite put my finger on the specific elements that made up the magnetic character of

Folkestone. Of course, my family and friends played a huge part in it, but it was more than that. It was the whole thing. The complex vortex that makes up Folkestone. The art scene. The seaside. The community. The lack of pretention, that I hope remains throughout the gentrification, that the town is now undoubtably facing. The town feels like a safe place to explore new things, whether that be art through the Folkestone Triennial, food (restaurants and pop ups are constantly…well… popping up) or music often played on the Harbour Arm. Add on top of that Folkestone’s dramatic coastline and how well connected it is to the capital, it is clearly a dreamy place to live. While the food, drink, music, art is all amazing, the key enticing element is the community. I did not notice the community for my first eighteen years. I thought Folkestone was a nosey place where everyone knew each other’s business. I could not wait to get out and live somewhere new. Then when that community was taken away so to speak, life became a bit colourless. Walking within a new city and not recognising anyone’s faces. Going into my local pub and them not knowing my order. Not being able to walk into friend’s homes, pop the kettle on and open the fridge. That familiarity was all gone. Everyone said I would get used to it, and in a way I did, but in a way I did not. My mum came to visit me in my final year at university, and when it was time for her to get on the train, I really cried. Not the pretty single tear kind of cry, I balled my eyes out. Then this young guy came up to me and asked if I was okay and if it was my first year being away from home, and I awkwardly explained it was

my third. We chatted a bit more and soon realised he was from Folkestone too. Folkestone has a way of following you around like that. We realised we had been to some of the same parties and had mutual friends and before I knew it, I felt at home once more. I am not sharing this anecdote to voice my sad little story, but to show that Folkestone really is about the people, because even without physically being there, it found me. One thing I did do to really cure my home sickness was visit cafes. Cafes are home to me because of Mermaids. I would study for hours in the Sainsbury Centre at UEA, or any little independent cafes in Norwich, ordering beverage after beverage and then lunch. I knew how annoying it was for someone to sit with one cappuccino for four hours taking up a whole table. Please readers, do not be that person. Then suddenly the coffee

grinder would go off again and ah, bliss. The sound (yes, I know it is irritating to most people), the smell, home. So fast forwarding to 2018. After I graduated, I was lost. Anyone else going through this please remember this is so normal, and sadly you work out what you do like doing, by doing a million things you dislike first. I went through a couple of conventional “dream jobs” that left me feeling unfulfilled. The only time I felt truly happy was working at Mermaids. I would moan about going to work with my mum but deep down I loved it. The days were long but meditative to me. I had to be present focusing solely on each customer and each order to get through what felt like mile long queue. This was the opposite of what I was “good” at. From a world of academia and a Politics and History degree under

my belt, I was thoroughly confused that making lattes was the thing that brought me most joy and peace. After years of having my head in books, I realised making coffees in busy surroundings was like therapy to me. My mum has had Mermaids for over twenty years and is such a huge inspiration to me. She lives her life, her way. I have learnt so much about how to run a business from my mum and seen the reality of it. The good and the bad. In my view, the positives hugely outweigh the negatives. Whilst studying for my teacher training, James (my partner) and I stumbled on a great café premise in the heart of the Creative Quarter in Folkestone next to the Quarter House. We had been toying with the idea of opening a café for a couple of years. I even found a notebook the other day with lists of café names if we ever did go for it. This was it. We had other ideas in the pipeline and locations, but James halted everything for this place. We just knew. Thus, The Nook was born. The end. Only joking, because of course, we signed for the lease 1st March 2020. When we went into lockdown in late March, like the whole hospitality industry, we really had no idea what this would mean for our café. Longstanding businesses, such as Mermaids, were in a slightly better off position with support from regular customers and a clear set position in the community. This meant that my mum could open for takeaways (when allowed) throughout the lockdowns that dominated 2020 and early 2021. The pandemic affected James and I differently, especially in the early lockdowns. This is because we had not even launched the business, meaning we had no regular customers rooting for us

and the town had no understanding of who we were as business. This was my biggest worry. Yet somehow, through the mayhem, we painted, designed menus, ordered a coffee machine and equipment, hired staff and were almost ready to open when the easing of lockdown was announced for July 2020. We had a fortnight to sort the finishing touches and the week before we opened was highly anxiety inducing. I would love to say we did it all alone, but that simply was not the case. We had so much help from family and friends and even from the community itself. As we were working, people would pop their heads round the door and tell us they loved what we had done to the space so far and promised to visit when we were open. Then when finally opening day arrived, that is exactly what happened. Everyone we knew came to support us at The Nook and slowly but surely, word got out about us, and we got more and more regular customers. James’ amazing food really helped our cause, and the warm atmosphere brought us many returning customers. Along with our hard work, the community of Folkestone had come through once again to support us and have continued to do so since with each easing of lockdown, most recently in April 2021. If I have learnt anything from opening a café through the pandemic, is that there is no point trying to control things that are out of your control. At some point, you must let go, hope for some good luck and be immensely grateful for the supportive community around you.

Fashion is a third to Tide and Time by Deklan Webb

Fashion is like a big wave that everyone is trying to surf. This tidal wave gradually floods the whole world with trends and brands splashing everyone along the way. When you ride it, its either a wipe out of fashion faux par or you ride the wave to outfit success. Having moved around the south coast of England a lot, I have played witness to the course of this wave and have definitely fallen off my board more than a few times. However, I can gladly say I have caught one or two perfect waves.

any sort of fashion trends, their glory comes from other places. The gem of any small seaside town is its charity shops. As there is fewer people that reside there, there is less competition to snatch up bargains. A luxury that I don’t believe exists in cities. From my experience I have found the more off the map a town is, the better the finds. Attending Uni in Falmouth, Cornwall, my housemates and I would regularly visit the small towns dotted about the Cornish country side and seafront.

I first became acquainted with the fashion wave after I had moved to Folkestone from Brighton. The year was 2010 and chinos, American Apparel and Superdry were all the rage (it gives me shivers looking back). There I was in Folkestone with my new group of friends in my milky tea coloured trousers, American Apparel zip up hoodie and Superdry coat feeling dope as hell. Only to find to Folkestone wasn’t ready for that, receiving weird looks and comments from my new friends. Low and behold a month or two later the wave had caught up with Folkestone but no one got wet, they were super dry.

If you are on the hunt for good garms, the smaller towns are definitely the place to go, where you are more likely to be in the splash zone. What I have also learned from finding clothes in charity shops is that it’s a spontaneous shopping experience, you never know what you will find which makes it all the more enjoyable. It allows you to be individual with what you wear making you less inclined to falling off your surf board.

Although it may seem like small towns and villages are the last to get hit by

Radical Regeneration by Daisy Cooper

After the downfall of the seaside town and tourism in the ‘70s, costal towns have been patiently waiting for the injection of interest required to jumpstart them back to being the holiday destination they once were. Coastal towns and cities alike have recently been going through a period of redevelopment,

both physically and culturally, due to a large influx of redirected funding and wealthy big-city investors looking for the next up-and-coming areas. This has raised issues such as the true pros and cons of gentrification and what that means for the longstanding residents of these communities.

A steadfast icon of British leisure, the seaside has always existed on not only a geographic, but symbolic edge. Encouraging and capitalising on transgression, it has provided an escape from the city, staged violent clashes between subcultures, birthed controversial art and nurtured queer bodies and their expressions of pride. It is a place apart, where the rules of capitalism are (at least partly) suspended: the structure of the working week is skewed and nature offers free pleasures in the form of space, sea and sky. Instead, the seaside is a site of intense, cultural

productivity, offering a unique radicality built upon freedom that oozes in from the beaches and onto the mainland. However, just as the seaside is exposed to the realities of salt and wind it too exposes in, in intense microcosm, the complicated realities of our nation as a whole. Here, issues surrounding unemployment, environment, age

and immigration rear their head. Once thriving holiday destinations, the arrival of affordable air travel destroyed the leisure-reliant economies of the seaside and disjointed communities formed as marginalised people, from refugees to retirees, were located by authorities into areas with cheap housing and little opportunity. For decades, the promise of adventure by the sea that existed in the 50s and 60s seemed to

have disappeared forever, replaced by crummy supermarkets, empty flats and countless William Hills. Since governmental reports from the early 2010s identified the disproportionate allocation of arts funding towards London, the hot phrase surrounding coastline redevelopment has been “arts-led regeneration”: economic and cultural revival, achieved through investment into arts and heritage. Much of this has been visibly directed towards the South East in towns such as Brighton, Folkestone and, famously with the introduction of the Turner Contemporary, Margate. But the influx of investment into the arts and rapid transformation of these areas has received much criticism, most notably in Margate.

Dubbed by Grayson Perry as harbouring, “the shock waves of gentrification” the Margate approach is accused of offering a glossy solution that caters for wealthy Londoners while exacerbating inequality, outpricing locals and seeking to create a culture homogenous to the capital, or “Peckham-by-the-sea.” Existing within Thanet – still the most deprived area in Kent – the experience of longstanding residents in Margate, while not unique, begs the question: can arts-led regeneration be a truly positive force or is it simply gentrification repackaged? Undeniable is that arts regeneration has bought a noticeable vibrancy to seaside towns in the South East. Awakening what was long thought a relic of the past, institutions like Turner Contemporary and events such as Folkestone’s Triennial have reignited the concept of seaside tourism. Not only are new creative quarters providing aesthetically pleasing and creative atmospheres, the visitors they attract help support local and

independent hospitality, catering and retail. Opportunities are also expanded to present and future creatives in the area through the growth of affordable studio spaces. Furthermore, young creatives who would previously have had to travel to London to interact with international artworks are able to find them on their doorstep. But the argument that simply providing opportunities for locals to engage with art provides sufficient social benefits so as to justify unrestrained arts-led regeneration is flawed. Putting to one side that no art featured in Folkestone’s Triennial has been created by a local artist, many residents, especially those with lower socio-economic resources, find art galleries intimidating and alienating. Granted, public facing artworks remove the barrier of having to physically enter an art space, but can we really claim that struggling local people feel a significant improvement in their lives because they’re confronted with a few sculptures throughout their day? In a context where the inequality gap is not closing but growing, many projects that claim to “get the locals involved” feel somehow self-indulgent and self-forgiving for one’s part in gentrification, if not outright offensive. What good is it to have a conceptual art piece erected in your town if you have not been afforded the education to understand how to engage with it? And what good is a project cocreated by locals if they cannot afford the bus ticket to visit the

work they helped create? In regenerating our seaside, do we really want to create a London art scene 2.0, tilted in favour of the already privileged, or is it possible to do better? Luckily, towns like Margate are beginning to rethink their approach, proposing more inclusive, expansive and frankly interesting approaches to arts-led regeneration. Recognising the limits of unrestrained regeneration, the proposals move towards amplifying the voices and desires of local people while balancing these with the benefits that arts-led regeneration brings. In 2020, The Margate School, an independent and not-for-profit liberal arts school took on a derelict Woolworth’s building in the centre of the high street. Pivoting towards affordable educational initiatives that provide meaningful training in the arts, whether foundation and bachelor’s degrees or workshops and short courses, is a fundamental way in which arts investment can provide tangible benefits for young creatives. To avoid the homogenisation of the seaside with cosmopolitan London, which would act only to erase its unique culture, regenerative attempts must shy away from funding flashy apartment complexes, in favour of protecting a town’s historic architecture and landmarks. Following the lead of Limbo – an artist studio complex which transformed a former electricity substation in Margate - Resort is an arts collective newly housed in a historic Victorian warehouse in Cliftonville. In doing so, these spaces do not efface the history and identity of the spaces they occupy.

Perhaps most significant, Margate has recently proposed the creation of a panel of local individuals who will work alongside the council, allowing them to directly influence the changes that affect them most. Democratic decision making that places real power in the hands of local individuals, alongside accountability procedures that slow and limit the unrestrained growth previously experienced by arts-led regeneration, is another crucial way in which regeneration can avoid gentrification in favour of respectful and genuinely positive change. From the compulsory reinvestment of arts revenue into local

infrastructure, to rent freezes and protections for longstanding independent businesses, residents and artists’ studios, arts-led regeneration of seaside towns offers a unique opportunity to be bold and imaginative. Through adopting an approach that prioritises local interests, whether through education, democratic processes, or other means, we can create truly radical spaces that will likely even have the edge on London.

Produced by Rebecca Townley for Final Major Project in Illustration for Screen Arts

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