HOPPING DOWN TO KENT
“I love it more than all the world and Margate,” is an expression used by a friend of mine, who adopted it from a TV comedy from way back. It has always rather tickled me. Why Margate?
‘Cool’, ‘hipster’, ‘the new Brighton’ and ‘Shoreditch-on-Sea’ are just some of the descriptions that have cropped up in recent articles in the press about this formerly popular holiday resort, which was very much down-at-heel only a decade ago.
As a one-time resident of Brighton, I wanted to find out why these accolades were now being applied to this recently revitalised coastal hotspot and rival to my favourite seaside town.
Margate and its near neighbours, Broadstairs and Ramsgate, are on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent’s eastern corner; and to get there, I decided to explore a little of the area’s history en route.
A working holiday
Plunging into the beautiful Kent countryside, you can’t fail to come across the quirky circular buildings capped by white funnels that tell of Kent’s history as a major producer of hops, used in the production of beer.
These are oast houses, where the hops were dried before being loaded onto carts pulled by Shire horses, to be sent by train to London’s major breweries. Nowadays, the world’s biggest collection of these historic buildings can be found at the Hop Farm, near Maidstone.
Before I set off on my Kentish travels, a chat with my Dad revealed that as a lad, he went hop-picking with his aunt, uncle and cousins.
Along with many other hop-pickers, they would arrive from London by train, and stayed in wooden huts. He chuckled at
