The Isle of Thanet: restructuring and municipal conservatism

Abstract

Introduction The ‘Isle of Thanet’ has not really been an island since the silting up of the Wantsum Channel during the Middle Ages, but it remains quite isolated in its corner of north-east Kent. Nowadays the only sea to be crossed in approaching Thanet from the west is a flat expanse of unfenced cabbage fields but this is sufficient to underscore a local sense of separateness, on occasions even of rejection. Kent County Council is thought to be run by representatives from the commuter belt of west Kent; a series of reorganizations in the public sector have removed administrative responsibilities from Thanet; and the recent strengthening of Canterbury’s role as the sub-regional shopping centre has enhanced feelings of relative deprivation. Although in other ways quite different, the somewhat insular mentality of Thanet people is akin to that noted on the Isle of Sheppey, 30 miles further up the Thames estuary (Pahl, 1985). And the area along this Kent coast is exceptional within a generally prosperous region in terms of its high unemployment and pockets of real deprivation. With over 100,000 residents (and 7000 unemployed) Thanet has the most substantial problems-and its unemployment rate (of 17.4 per cent in August 1987) is above that of any other travel-to-work area within 200 miles.In fact, Thanet stands out from the rest of Kent on a whole series of social indicators, including juvenile crime, single parent families, dependence on benefits, and car ownership levels - a complex of problems which a report by local teachers saw as involving a distinctive ‘Thanet dimension’ (Martin and Ellis, 1982). Alongside these real problems there is a tendency to ‘moral panic’ linked to perceived threats to the resort image from invasions particularly of young people. In the 1960s this was focused on the Mods and Rockers who came and fought on Bank Holiday weekends — the ‘petty 1 Urban and Regional Studies Unit, University o f Kent at Canterbury sawdust Caesars’ castigated by a local magistrate; in the 1980s it focused more on the young migrant unemployed seeking cheap seaside accommodation and casual employment, who were seen as the harbingers of a Costa del Dole. At the same time it is clear that problems are by no means the monopoly o f ‘outsiders’. A large part of the local population, particularly among the retired and older workers, are themselves migrants from elsewhere.Thanet’s modern identity is the creation of the 1974 local govern­ment reorganization which merged the administration of the three distinct resort towns of Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs, and their rural hinterland. In political terms they have not been integrated fully, however; each retains its own particular image and market niche in the tourist and retirement trades, and each has somewhat different clusters of economic interest. Margate, although one of the earliest seaside resorts o f the gentry, has for most of its history specialized in a more cheerful, vulgar or ‘Cockneyfied’ style of tourism, epitomized in the Dreamland amusement park on its Golden Mile fronting the well used sands. Ramsgate, to the south, shares some of Margate’s character, although with fewer day trippers, but its principal feature is its substantial harbour, catering both for LOCALITIES yachtsmen, and less picturesquely for commercial traffic including both Volkswagen imports and the Sally Line’s ferry operation to Dunkirk. Industrial activities have also assumed rather more import­ance in the town than elsewhere in Thanet. Finally, there is Broadstairs, another Victorian resort, wedged between the two larger towns but still retaining a much quieter character and consider­able charm, with Charles Dickens’s Bleak House its nearest counter­part to Dreamland. What unites the three towns, apart from the substantial travel to work between them, is the fact that tourism to each of them has been in decline since the 1950s and needs either regeneration or replacement by some other economic base. The economic interests of those actively involved in local politics remain somewhat distinct, however, and this has contributed to the frag­mented and factional character of policy making in Thanet. The determination of each town to maintain its shopping centre has meant that some multiple stores have not located in Thanet at all since Thanet Council would neither give priority to one town over another, nor allow out of town shopping development. This helped the growth of Canterbury where there were no such hesitations.In many respects Thanet is less peculiar than its situation, its history or its self-perceptions indicate. Indeed, although it has been indelibly marked by its history as a resort area, its economic activities are now more diverse, including (up to the recession) a fairly average propor­tion of manufacturing employment. In social terms, too, it is much less uniformly middle class than either the resort image or its conti­nuity of Conservative representation at Westminster would suggest. Even its residential geography has recognizable parallels with larger cities. Each of the three towns has a central area close to the sea front with a mobile and socially deprived popualtion, surrounded by rings of subsequent development which are progressively more affluent, until one reaches the areas developed in the post war period, which include both comfortable owner occupied neighbourhoods and peri­pheral council estates with some of the most disadvantaged house­holds in Thanet.To give some flavour to the differences in social struture which exist within Thanet, and to emphasize the importance of not treating such localities as uniform entities with common problems and interests, we give brief sketches of six areas, five of which were studied as part of our household interview survey. The areas were also identified from an analysis of demographic and social data, and represent most of the major types of residential neigbourhoods to be found in Thanet.Central Margate is one of the oldest areas and some at least of its current physical fabric dates back to the eighteenth century. However much of what now exists is a product of very piecemeal tourist- related development and redevelopment in the nineteenth and twenti­eth centuries. The front contains a mixture of amusement arcades, a few hotels and largely vacant shops abutting a busy road, and then a sandy beach, still very crowded on summer weekends. Behind are a few streets of considerable character, an unremarkable 1960s shop­ping development and, to the east, areas of dereliction and disrepair. Socially the area is very mixed indeed, but it contains relatively few families with children. The considerable amount of rented housing attracts a rather mobile population. The most extreme instance is the growing use of hotel and boarding house accommodation for long­term residents, particularly those in receipt of social security payments. These included young single people, until changes in benefit regulations interrupted this, and still include many unemployed families and older single people as well as those dis­charged from mental hospitals. The stock of relatively cheap low-grade accommodation of various types in the area thus mitigates the housing problems of a much wider region. The result is a major local concentration of unemployed, with current unemployment rates probably well over 40 per cent. This area also contains considerable numbers of self-employed people who have set up businesses, particularly shops and hotels. Many of these people came from outside Thanet, again because Thanet provided cheap property. Few appear to have succeeded in any large way, and many have failed and moved on, some to other parts o f Thanet. However they make up a large part o f the population of the area at any time.Our second area was part of the inner Victorian and Edwardian suburbs on the north side of Ramsgate. The area consists o f terraced houses, some of which are three and four storeys, and are let as flats or rooms, and others smaller houses, mainly in owner occupation. Socially this is very much a working class area, and many of the people we interviewed there worked, or had worked, in manufactur­ing jobs. But, like the Margate area, it was characterized by a rather high turnover of population, and there were many single and divorced people and single parent families. Like central Margate, this was an area of relatively cheap and accessible housing opportunities. People had moved between jobs frequently, many had made con­siderable use of seasonal jobs and jobs in the tourist industry, and many had experienced lengthy spells of unemployment.Newington, also in Ramsgate, is a council estate built in the 1950s. It was built largely as a cottage development with considerable attention to street layout and open space, but now looks uncared for and conveys a sense of dereliction. Like most council estates of this type it has a very stable population, and the current residential mix reflects the age o f the estate. A ‘family’ household structure predomi­ nates, with more children than the central areas. In some ways this represents the most stable working class area of Thanet, and the level of job stability is higher here for people in manual jobs than elsewhere. Also, more people work in manufacturing here. This area has the highest level of Labour voting and, from our survey, a greater tendency to use the language of class in interpreting local and national problems. Like other working class areas of Thanet, Newington is characterized by high levels of unemployment and what seems an exceptionally high level of long-term sickness.Birchington, which is on the north coast five miles from Margate, began to grow in the nineteenth century but has seen substantially more growth in the post war period. This has mainly been in the form of housing for the elderly, including many bungalows as well as larger houses, and like other parts of the coast west of Margate it has been one of the major destinations for retirement migration. Although now part o f a continuous development along the coast it still strives to maintain a separate ‘village’ identity. The proportion of elderly in the population in 1981 was 40 per cent. Birchington is relatively affluent compared with the rest of Thanet, and political interests here (and in other retirement areas of Thanet) tend to diverge from the tourism interest: the main issues in Birchington relate to low rates and resisting intrusive development.2Our last two areas were both built up in the 1970s but they offer extreme contrasts in social disadvantage. The first is a private owner-occupied estate on the outskirts of Broadstairs with an open plan design which might be found in any small town development of this period. In Thanet terms this area has a relatively affluent and relatively young population. There is a greater contrast than else­where between the work experience of men and women, largely because the men’s work histories are so different from the Thanet norm. They are generally in stable, skilled, working class or non-manual jobs, and there are some self-employed people, while the women’s work experience is much more irregular, with few longer term jobs (those there are being largely public sector) and, as elsewhere, a reliance on short term catering or tourist-related jobs. However, even in this area some men have experienced redundancies and there are unemployed teenage children.Millmead, finally, is a 1970s council estate on the southern out­skirts of Margate, though parts of it were in fact built by a speculative private builder, so that its building style is not so distinct from the previous area. It is however a classic ‘sink estate’, with very high proportions of single parent families and long-term unemployed, arid 2 Because our concerns relate principally to the working age population o f Thanet, Birchington was not included in our interview survey.

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