In a town that has seen better days, this is a red-letter day.
For years in the English seaside town of Margate, things have shut down — shops, hotels, the Dreamland amusement park that used to draw crowds of visitors to this brash resort.
Saturday, however, sees an opening, the launch of a 17 million pound ($28 million) art gallery that Margate hopes will restore fortunes which have declined since Britons abandoned bracing beach holidays for flights to sunnier spots.
"The social and economic regeneration of the area has begun," John Kampfner, chair of trustees of the new Turner Contemporary gallery, said Friday. "The whole atmosphere of the area has been transformed."
That's a big claim for an art gallery, but Turner Contemporary is ambitious. It is part of a plan to remake this town, one of the most deprived in England, where a vanished tourist trade has left buildings empty and high levels of unemployment. Joblessness in the poorest parts of Margate is three times the regional average.
The gallery draws on Margate's links with 19th-century artist J.M.W. Turner, who declared the skies here in England's wind-swept southeast corner "the loveliest in all Europe."
Today those magnificent skies look down on a long, sandy beach, and on a seafront pocked with dilapidated Victorian villas, shuttered shops and the boarded-up Dreamland with its skeletal rides.
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