Fwd: Why has the This is Margate website has been removed?

A few weeks ago I noticed that Margate's flagship cultural strategy website had been taken down and any enquiries to the www.thisismargate.co.uk URL were re-directed to the very bland and unappealing website for the Thanet Regeneration Board. I posted about it here on Feb 12th. I then wrote to Thanet Council's Chief Executive, Sue McGonigal. Sue said she would look into it. A few days ago I got a reply back from a Justine Wingate.

I have a number of issues with the reply and stance taken by TDC. Not all of my questions have been addressed. I simply cannot see why it is an either or situation. Surely, the Margate website could have stayed up as well as launching the Thanet Regeneration Board website? And who has made the decision at TDC to stop promoting the individual character of Margate and merge into the one district brand? I don't recall being contacted or included in this huge change, which seems to be undoing all the work many of us participated in at various workshops and consulation exercises over the last few years.

Margate has a strong cultural identity. As do the other towns and villages in Thanet. The Thanet Regeneration Board is not.

How many of you were contacted about this change?

And the fact that key policy documents were just removed without a trace is worrying. Especially after attending the Ezekiel trial last week when these very board meetings from the Margate Renewal Partnership Board were discussed.

From: Justine Wingate
Date: 1 March 2013 17:31
Subject: RE: Margate's marketing website has been removed?
To: Louise Oldfield

Dear Ms. Oldfield,

Thank you for your feedback in relation to the 'This is Margate' website.

The implementation of the Thanet Regeneration Board was not intended
to replace the 'This is Margate' website but was instead a deliberate
move to ensure a more inclusive approach to regeneration for the
Thanet district as a whole. The council still absolutely recognises
the cultural and creative sector in Margate but it is important that
our websites equally reflect this across the district.

The council is still committed to using the Live Margate branding and
as you rightly pointed out, this is currently being used for the
Housing Regeneration project. We are also committed to ensuring that
all of the Thanet towns are equally represented and intend to include
branding and searchable geographical content for all of them as part
of the ongoing improvements to the functionality of our new website.

The council is currently reviewing and updating its digital presence
and as part of the review an audit of council websites was undertaken.
As a result of this it was noted that the 'This is Margate' website
had received very little unique traffic (following its launch), other
than during the time that it was utilised for the promotion of the
Countdown to Turner campaign in 2011. It was taken down in September
2012 when the Thanet Regeneration Board launched.

I appreciate your point about maintaining the engagement of the small
creative business community and I will include this, for consideration
across the district, as part of the new Economic Regeneration
Strategy which is due to launch later this year.

I will also ensure that any policy documents that were available on
the 'This is Margate' site are reinstated on the Thanet Regeneration
Board website.

Yours sincerely,

Justine Wingate
Corporate Information & Communications Manager
Thanet District Council

www.thanet.gov.uk




-----Original Message-----
From: Louise Oldfield
Sent: 12 February 2013 09:36
To: Sue McGonigal
Subject: Margate's marketing website has been removed?

Dear Sue,

I hope you are well.

I was confused last night to see that the Creative Industry centric
marketing website for Margate www.thisismargate.co.uk has been removed
and replaced by the Thanet Regeneration Board website.

I don't recall hearing about this major strategy u-turn.

Please can you give me some details on how this decision has come about?

Where are all the policy documents and content from the Margate website?

Surely, seeing as we have already paid for the site it should be up as
well as the TRB?

I would also like to know how we as the engaged small creative
business community can be involved with the TRB?

How were the current board members chosen? And how long will they
serve on the board?

Kind regards,

Louise Oldfield

Has Margate's Cultural Strategy been scrapped?

Yesterday, I noticed that the Council funded website www.thisismargate.co.uk has been taken down and now redirects automatically to the Thanet Regeneration Board.

'This is Margate' was a site developed after lengthy public consultation exercises and sought to pitch Margate as a center for creative and cultural regeneration that had underpinned much of the funding in town over the last decade.

Design work was undertaken by Studio Baum, who previously had done some really great work for the Margate Rocks festival. 'This is Margate' was was designed around the theme of seaside postcards and classic cliched slogans.

A colour palette was developed. The site was a central point where you could find key cultural strategy policy documents and held newsletters and minutes from the board meetings of the Margate Renewal Partnership, the agency tasked with taking forward, Margate's ambitious regeneration plans of which the building of Turner Contemporary was key. If you wanted to know what was going on and where things were headed, this was the site you went to.

Margate Renewal Partnership was wound up in 2011. Margate's website however, funded to publicise the creative regeneration aspect of Margate continued.

Further work on developing a Margate brand identity was undertaken in 2010-2011. A creative brief was issued by Thanet Council and interviews commenced with various agencies pitching their concept for Margate to panels of stakeholders. London based brand agency, Underscore were chosen to create the Margate brand. A series of evening workshops were held as social events with the community invited to participate. These events were dubbed the 'Margate Conversation'.

Margate's views were taken on board, ideas shared over many hours and weeks. I covered it here on the blog. Underscore's solution built on the legacy of the work undertaken previously on This is Margate. Colour coded sections were created for topic areas such as Live Margate (which actually being used on the www.livemargate.co.uk site for the £21m housing renewal stuff up in Cliftonville).

Underscore's slogan 'Margate. The Original Seaside' was developed. Hoardings were printed, litter bins re-sprayed hot pink, Council literature was produced in line with the new brand guidance toolkit document.

So, how do we arrive at the situation where, after all the care, time and public expense has been taken to consult and develop a Margate brand, that anyone tapping Margate Renewal Partnership or www.thisismargate.co.uk into their browser is brought to the dry as a bone clip-art-tastic, badly designed website for the Thanet Regeneration Board? After all the efforts to run democratic groups so people can be actively involved do we find out about this by accident.

But before getting to grips with what the TRB actually is and how we in Margate can input into it:

Why did the This is Margate website have to be removed in the first place to be replaced by an unknown Thanet committee page?

Where did they get those fonts from and that palette?

I think Thanet Council should put www.thisismargate.co.uk back up. It belonged to Margate and we the people of Margate worked hard to input into it. Bring back This is Margate!

Has there been a change in strategy? Are we now to cease having a Margate cultural strategy and come under the new era of a the Thanet Regeneration Board? 

Daytrippers spend £9 per day in Margate

Back to looking at various visitor profiles as part of the discussion on the possible effect of the Tesco store near the beach. Back in 2008, Margate Renewal Partnership stated that daytrippers who come to the beach and leave spend on average £9 per day as opposed to £20 that is hoped the cultural tourist will spend who wanders more round the town and visits the gallery. Full article:

http://www.building.co.uk/turner-profit/3117366.article

The 19th-century artist JMW Turner once observed that ‘the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all of Europe’ – something of a contrast to the ugly, grey tower block that dominates the present-day skyline of his beloved Margate.

From every vantage point, the eye is immediately drawn to the 1960s-built blot on the landscape. It pretty much embodies the careworn buildings and down-at-heel environment of the Kent seaside resort.

But things are set to change – visually, at any rate – as a result of an ambitious proposal for a modern art gallery on a site near where Turner stayed on his regular visits to the town. After 20 years in the pipeline and one false start, the Turner Contemporary is going to be built.

Designed by Stirling Prize-winning architect David Chipperfield, the £17.5m gallery will be clad in white, opaque glass to reflect the light that inspired Turner.

The various local authorities and public sector agencies behind the venture are in the final throes of picking a contractor after securing planning permission from Thanet District Council in February. Construction will start this autumn for completion by 2010.

If nothing else, it will be a stunning addition to the skyline. But the project’s backers hope the building will be far more than architectural eye candy. Although the gallery will promote modern art, part of it will be set aside for an ever-changing collection of Turner paintings, following an agreement with their permanent home, the Tate. Such an irresistible combination will turn Margate into a cultural hot spot. That’s the theory, anyway.

‘The Turner Contemporary is the catalyst for a whole range of cultural experiences and facilities, which we hope will generate local employment, business opportunities and create a thriving creative sector,’ says Derek Harding, programme director of urban regeneration company Margate Renewal Partnership.

Generating income

Harding’s hopes for the Turner Contemporary are based on predictions of 85,000 visitors each year, generating £1.7m in income, or £20 a head. He says that, currently, day trippers to Margate use the car parks, eat their sandwiches on the beach and leave, spending only £9 each on average.

‘What we want to do is bring the type of visitor who is normally attracted to Canterbury and your more established cultural offers, draw them into the area and hopefully ensure that they come back and visit not just Margate, but east Kent,’ says Harding.

There is no such thing as an original idea when it comes to seaside regeneration. Margate is just the latest resort to turn to art as a means of tourist trade gentrification. As Harding freely acknowledges, the model he is following is Tate St Ives, which is widely judged to have been a success for the Cornish town. Along the Kent coast, meanwhile, the spotlight is on the inaugural Folkestone Triennial, a widely publicised exhibition running over the summer and featuring artists such as Tracey Emin.

Famously shortlisted for the Turner Prize, ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ – her own description – has also spoken out in favour of the Turner Contemporary in the press, albeit some years ago — this has been a long-running project.

By coincidence, the gallery’s Fort Hill site is next to the spot where Emin tried to take her own life by leaping from the harbour wall.

Folkestone and Margate are similar in the scale of their economic decline and the challenge they face in altering perceptions and attracting a new generation of visitors. Indeed, these problems are common to all UK resorts, prompting the British Urban Regeneration Association to establish a steering group for seaside towns, chaired by Harding.

Not everyone is convinced about their artistic leanings, however. Following the triennial’s opening last month, Eamonn Maxwell, curator of London’s University of the Arts and a resident of Brighton, questioned the link between art and seaside regeneration. In a letter to the London Evening Standard, Maxwell wrote: ‘For culture to work in any town, it has to have a local audience. Getting the cool London set down for the private view is all well and good, but who is going to visit Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion on a wet Monday?’

Maxwell described even Brighton’s art scene as ‘quite provincial’. He added: ‘Brighton is about an hour from London by train and many curators, designers and artists live here, but work in the capital. Art has played little part in the town’s regeneration over the past 20 years.’

Yet Margate – which Harding says has a level of unemployment and related economic problems that are among the worst in the region – hopes to make a national impact with the Turner Contemporary, although projected visitor numbers have been scaled back since Chipperfield came on board in 2006. More than 150,000 visitors a year were envisaged for an earlier proposal for an offshore gallery designed by Norwegian architect Snohetta and Spence, before it was scrapped when its projected costs rose from £7m to £50m.

Contrasting views

Ambitious projects such as Turner Contemporary are not easy anywhere, but in a jaded seaside resort such as Margate, there are sharply contrasting views about what constitutes heritage and value for taxpayers’ money.

Harding admits it has been hard to sell the idea of an art gallery to some local residents, who believe the money could be more usefully spent on schools and healthcare.

The town’s other key regeneration project – the mixed-use redevelopment of the Dreamlands amusement park – has been the subject of a vocal anti-development campaign. There are just as strong feelings towards preserving slot machines and rollercoaster rides as there are towards promoting art.

It is ironic, as Harding notes, that Margate’s decline should worsen during a decade of sustained economic growth in the south-east, and that this most ambitious cultural project is getting off the ground just as the credit crunch has put a stop to development elsewhere.

In some respects, the gallery is already regenerating the town. With funding from the South East England Development Agency, Turner Contemporary, the organisation that will run the gallery, has moved into the formerMarks & Spencer store on the high street, turning it into exhibition space for the next few years. M&S’s withdrawal from the town three years ago was symptomatic of Margate’s plight, but the most recent art exhibition at its old site attracted 19,000 visitors over three months.

Harding says private art galleries and restaurants have leased some of the old town’s empty shops. The idea is to ‘replicate the feel and environment’ of the Lanes, the popular retail area behind the seafront in Brighton.

But perhaps the most heartening spin-off from the Turner Contemporary is at the adjacent Rendezvous site, where Kent County Council and Thanet District Council have selected Gleeson Developments as development partner for a big mixed-use project. It is yet to be worked up in detail, but will feature housing and a four-star hotel. Harding reveals that Gleeson beat a bid from Urban Splash, best known for its innovative housing projects in northern England.

‘Both of them said they wouldn’t have looked at it without the Turner Contemporary,’ he reveals.

Margate in the Press: The Arts Council 'Making over Margate'

"Making Over Margate

Date: 21 December 2009
Region: South East

It's hard to miss Margate in the news these days, whether it's featuring as a location for The Apprentice or in a report about the latest installment in the story of its remarkable makeover.

Heritage amusement park Dreamland in Margate is receiving £3.7 million from coastal regeneration programme Sea Change, while Turner Contemporary, poised to be one of the south east's premier visual arts galleries, is inching closer to its 2011 completion with its recent topping out ceremony.

Margate is a great example of how art can play an effective role in regeneration. Once a popular seaside resort in the 1960s and '70s, Margate has been marred with multiple social and economic problems, dwindling resources, and a shrinking tourism industry.

As its most famous resident, artist Tracey Emin wistfully wrote: 'I want someone who is a giant to come along and treat Margate like their very own special model village. Make Dreamland a place possible for teenage lovers to have dreams, the Teddy Boys to whirl on the wurlitzer and Mods to dodge with their girlfriends on the dodgems... Margate has become Britain's tragic Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, almost nothing can save her.'

Thankfully, Margate is no longer a lost cause. A combination of agencies, councils and organisations have played a crucial role in changing the town's fortunes. In 2006, Kent County Council and Thanet District Council joined forces with Government Office South East, English Heritage, South East England Development Agency, English Partnerships, and Arts Council England, South East to create the Margate Renewal Partnership, which has been overseeing regeneration plans.

At the heart of these plans is a cultural vision that sees art and creativity as the driving force for invigorating the local economy, inspiring residents, and attracting visitors - not as just an add-on feature.

'The change in Margate is palpable,' says Sophie Jeffrey, Regeneration Officer for Arts Council England, South East. 'When you get off the train now and see Turner Contemporary rising up on the horizon, it's as if you can actually feel regeneration in the air. And the Sea Change award to Dreamland - one of only two large awards in the country - is testament to that.'

'Having an arts partner changes the viewpoint of an organisation, from being site-driven to thinking about its communities,' says Sarah Wren, Arts and Regeneration Officer for East Kent, Kent County Council. 'The Margate neighbourhood plans are focusing on areas of deprivation and looking at the way council services are being delivered - and how arts and culture will be a key part of that. Turner Contemporary, for instance, has been successful in working with local audiences.'

The Margate Renewal Partnership's 10-year plan has earmarked development for 10 prime sites, including Turner and Dreamland. When complete, the new developments will also create 633 full-time equivalent jobs, 1565 residential units, 16,000 m² of retail space, 13,000 m² of leisure facilities, 37.5 acres of reclaimed brownfield land and 350 new hotel rooms.

Art and regeneration work has already benefited other areas in East Kent such as Folkestone, Dover, and Canterbury. 'All East Kent towns are fairly distinctive so the way in which arts and culture features in their regeneration plans is slightly different,' explains Sarah Wren. 'Dover is focused on the built environment and heritage, while somewhere like Folkestone has been good at setting up cultural agencies and small and medium-sized enterprises.'

Investment also increases an area's levels of talent and aspiration. Whitstable Biennale, Folkestone Triennial and Quarterhouse in Folkestone are all good examples. 'The Biennale has been successful at raising the game of the area in terms of visual arts, and it's put the town on the map in terms of its contemporary arts,' continues Sarah Wren.

As Alan Davey, Arts Council England Chief Executive, said at the Culture is Right conference, arts investment is a crucial aspect of regeneration - money attracts money. For every £1 the Arts Council invests, £2 is brought in. 'Private money likes to follow success,' he added.

The Arts Council's investment in time, money and resources across the region means that we'll be seeing more regeneration successes like Margate's in the future."