Thames Barrier

It turns out you can get to the Thames barrier via a DLR stop called Pontoon Dock. Finding information on how to get there on the day proved futile, with no real directions online. Hooked by photos of the strange metal domes rising out of the Thames and undeterred by sketchy details we decided to start at Greenwich and head east on the Thames’ southbank.

In Greenwich Naval College, waiting for a friend in The Old Brewery (owned by Meantime Brewing Company) an afternoon drinking London Stout and India Pale Ale in the restaurant bar was narrowly avoided. Once on the stretch of the Thames path, walking through vast expanses of hoardings, iron railings, abandoned shipping equipment, with expansive vistas of the Thames, and a filmic vantage point of the City, we were glad to have persevered, despite the more gentile option of leisurely inebriation in Greenwich pubs.

After skirting around the Cutty Sark the next landmark is The Dome, which you can see far off on the curve of the Thames. The riverbank to it is a no man’s land. On the way we found an undisturbed makes-shift shrine to a teenager killed somewhere nearby, strewn with tokens and tributes from his friends, and family and crew, including letters, a football strip, a bag of Haribo and half an ounce of skunk on a plinth.

With enough desolate buildings, graffiti and wasteland to conjure up districts of Detroit, our path soon crossed with the A102 full of traffic entering the Blackwall Tunnel. Winding our way round the O2 was a lot less scenic, but, soon back on track, past a power station, then a cooling tower, off in the distance, the elusive barriers came into sight.

Unfortunately we were in complete darkness by this point, so the metallic grey majesty of the structures was lost on us, and we became distracted by the gap between the bank of the Thames and the start of the barrier which did not bode well for tidal defence. Forgetting this, each of the main steel flood gates is the size of a five storey house, and sturdy competition for a swelling river. The barriers have gone up over 100 times since they were constructed in the 70s/80s to protect London from flooding.

Trying to find a transport link at this end of the walk added some unwelcome mileage, through deserted business parks, port authority car parks, cash and carry warehouses, and along Woolwich Road, which delivered us at Charlton station, where we sloped past a line of police marshal vans and joined the tail end of the wave of Charlton football fans onto the train to London Bridge, keen to throw ourselves into a main transport hub after a few twilight miles on London’s desolate periphery.

We made a pact to return however, via DLR, to see the shell like sculptures from the contemporary landscaped gardened Thames Barrier Park, or even Greenwich Yacht club house, which is elevated on giant legs above water level. We might also visit the information centre to put our mind at rest on the logistics of flood defence.

Outtripping rating: 7 out of 10, the walk from Greenwich was better than we expected, the walk along Woolwich Road was a lot worse.
Don’t miss: The way that London landmarks appear upside down and out of place as you walk north on the south side of the U-turn in the Thames.

Southwold

Suffolk’s Southwold on Sea is a small and perfectly formed coastal town about 2 and a half hours drive from London. It’s an upmarket seaside choice; even its amusement arcade is subdued, tastefully painted and without fruit machines to attract serious gamblers. It has cute beach huts on the shore and the smell of chips frying pleasantly mingles with the salty air.

Our friends from Norfolk seem to think that Southwold’s a bit snooty and had mumbled in a worried manner about expensive parking but as it turned out the parking was free so perhaps that was a pinch of the old county rivalry. It has to be said though, in these ‘tough economic times’ that I didn’t see much change for a tenner for fish and chips and mushy peas in the cafe here, which kind of took the shine off of a kitsch day out at the seaside. 

Southwold Pier is known for housing the ‘Under the Pier Show’ designed by local artist Tim Hunkin. He has created a bizzaro amusement arcade with machines like ‘micro break’ a speeded up package holiday from flight to perilous cliff top coach ride to beach- all from an unsteady arm chair, ‘Auto Frisk’-where rubber hands pat you down for a fee, described as ‘a million times better than a strip search from the Met tactical support group’ by one of our party and ‘Mobilty Masterclass’ in which you get to virtually race round town on a mobility scooter. There are also several of his moving sculptures dotted around the pier and a ‘Quantum Tunnelling Telescope’ at the end. Hunkin has created a world that disorientates and sucks you in, so much so that on leaving the pier I found myself questioning whether a seagull was one of his machines.

I hope to return to Southwold on a sweltering summer’s day to make the most of the sandy beach and the pretty surroundings. There’s an attractive 19^th Century lighthouse that’s open in summer and the medieval church could be worth a look, or if that sounds a bit predictable there’s always Sizewell Nuclear Power station down the road which does tours.

Outtripping Rating: 3 out of 5

Nice town- worth a visit if your in the area. The Under the Pier Show brings some excitement and modernity. Bit pricey.

Fun Fact: The writer George Orwell spent time as a teenager and in his thirties in Southwold, living at his parents’ home. A plaque can be seen next door to what is now the fish and chip shop at the far end of the High Street.

Lewes

We arrived in Lewes late afternoon and spent some time cruising the suburbs in search of a parking space, unwittingly contravening don’t drive to Lewes on bonfire night wisdom, before finally securing a spot and following people on foot.

Because it is a historic town set in the South Downs, with a mixture of hills and cliffs rising above it, Lewes looks exciting even without the added allure of its bonfire night revelries.

By late afternoon on our day (or night) trip, Lewes already felt like a cross between a battle re-enactment, Notting Hill carnival and the Brixton riots, with members of each local firework society (marked by different coloured stripes across their jumpers) grouping outside the various pubs, marching bands in bright lycra costumes stood around waiting for proceedings to commence, granddads in full medieval regalia brandishing chip forks and tankards of ale and firecrackers ricocheting off every inch of pavement.

Whilst every teenager in Lewes and its radius villages seemed to be out on the streets, all children appeared to be out of the way. Except one wearing a red and white striped woollen jumper, to match his dad, who had him held up in one arm while drinking a can of Strongbow in the other. They both looked fearless.

After sitting on the pavement for a bit with can of coke and a battered sausage, feeling a bit edgy from firecrackers, and paranoid our eardrums were bleeding, we rammed ourselves into a pub and got a drink and a table. Sensing solidarity and pride in the air of Lewes we decided to find out more about Lewes Bonfire, and the procession of the martyrs.

When Queen Mary I (Bloody Mary) took the English throne in 1553, struck allegiance with Rome, and reverted England to Catholicism, ruthlessly executing Protestant ‘heretics’, Lewes was the public execution site of seventeen Protestant martyrs, burned at the stake.

Whilst reading a medical account of burning at the stake, a procession began to move past the window of the pub, and we could make out a funeral parade of cloaked men carrying a hearse under torchlight.

We left the pub and worked our way through the back streets, now strewn with burning crosses and torch wagons made of oil barrels mounted on metal wheels, and crushed up wherever we could to see the main procession of wagons, effigies, and hoards and hoards of flaming torches. We could just about catch the sombre speeches and sinister sound of bagpipes in between the onslaught of phosphorescent firecrackers which turned the sky pink.

Seemingly surrounded by pyromaniacs on crack and fully immersed in the medieval flow of things, we pushed and shoved our way around, with the towering forehead of David Cameron sailing past us one minute and an effigy of Gaddafi burning in hell the next, and worked our way past a row of fast food stands on the outskirts of town, to the site of the free bonfire.

This turned out to be a muddy field filled with people waiting for the arrival of the parade and a hotdog stand. The procession got hindered and to fill time a man with a Liam Gallagher like gait broke from the crowd and climbed the unlit bonfire (the size of a house) and for a while the crowd entertained themselves by throwing firecrackers at him while he smoked his cigarette, swigged from a can of beer and concentrated on not flinching.

After quite a long, and cold, while, as it got a bit Wicker Man, and we figured an anarchic tipping point was approaching, the torch and effigy bearers arrived, the bonfire was ignited, and the fireworks got going against the towering ball of flames.

Something about the inebriated teenagers danced around doing poppers, the fireworks, and pagan feeling around Lewes Bonfire put us on a high on the empty road back to London, making us only slightly jealous of our friends, who we never managed to find, taxying it seven miles up the road to a bedstop in Brighton.

Outtripping rating: 5 out of 5

Bonfire Night in Lewes scores points for being big, loud, medieval, and the right side of anarchic.

Don’t miss: The period Victorian conservatory at the Crown Inn on Lewes High Street. Specials include new cheesy corned beef hash pie, chips and beans.

Dungeness

We arrived at Dungeness mid afternoon and parked the car by the Shingle House, the Living Architecture project, which sits, a neat black wood and glass house, on the huge expanse of shingle that makes up the muted, grey landscape. Other cottages appear, sporadic, eery and seemingly vacant, with weird abandoned machinery and religious memorabilia in the gardens. There are some bursts of flora and fauna to break up the otherwise flat expanse of low-lying shingle and sand. It feels a bit like a trailer park, or the end of the world, like life has slowly petered out; a bit post-apocalyptic. The Romney & Hythe Railway passing through at regular intervals, appearing scarcely bigger than a model railway, even in the near distance, served as the sole reminder of nearby civilisation.

We walked over a mound of shingle to see the sea and found a washed up car battery, and took to throwing rocks at it from a distance, slowly chipping away at it, for quite some time, while the daylight began to fade away, until we noticed a couple appear over the mound of shingle in the distance. Quickly abandoning our obliterating battery, we headed for the Pilot Inn, with its comforting cups of tea, fish and chips and shelves of dated second hand books for one pound each. We lingered here longer than you might usually in a beach restaurant, indulging in the desserts menu, heavy on whipped cream, and browsing women’s health manuals from 1989.

As we left the Pilot a whole new landscape appeared, as the lights of the Dungeness Nuclear Power Stations on the headland had now lit up. It was like an unnoticed city had emerged, and as we packed into the car it felt as though we were departing from a very different daytrip destination than the one we arrived at.

This was a very short daytrip, but the gravitas of the surroundings gave it full dramatic impact, and its desolate atmosphere did bring out some Lord of the Flies like behaviour, even in the short time we were there.

We only passed Derek Jarman’s cottage (Prospect Cottage) which was optimistic with its bright yellow window frames, and lines from a John Donne poem scrolled on the side. Jarman made experimental films, and art, and his shingle garden at the cottage. Apparently an art crowd including Tilda Swinton half naked hung around there a lot at the time. In 1989 he directed the UK Pet Shop Boys tour. He died when he was only 52 and is buried in the graveyard at Romney Marsh.

On a return trip to Dungeness, for a bitterly cold weekend, we spent more time in the Pilot cafe, until it took on familiarity like home. We finished the weekend with a short drive to Camber Sands, and a brisk walk on the beach in bright sunlight, which blew away the gloominess of Romney Marsh.

We didn’t get to see the sound mirrors in Denge (a former Royal Air Force site near Dungeness) as you need an organised tour now to take you. The concrete acoustic reflectors were built on the coast to provide early warning of incoming enemy aircraft, before the invention of radar in the 1930s, and look very iconic. Tacita Dean has made a film about them and Turin Breaks used them on an album cover.  

We also missed the birdlife, insect life and plantlife of Dungeness and Romney Marsh, which are a big attraction amongst scientists and twitchers because of the unique species that flourish there.

Outtripping rating: 8 out of 10: This is the ultimate day trip destination for atmosphere, even though there is nothing to do.

Don’t miss: The atmosphere.

Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker

The end of a twisting forest road, deep in Essex, is marked by a mast-topped hill and what could be mistaken for the car park of an armed survivalist group. A plain bungalow with an armoured car sat outside hides the entrance to Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker. Located opposite is some kind of tree based all ages adventure playground. I’d never claim to be a leisure expert but I got the impression that the two tourist enterprises were linked in some way. The spirit of on-the-ropes adventure fun has seeped into the corridors, dormitories and offices of the bunker. There’s a loose, almost irreverent, antiquarian tinge to the presentation of cold war history throughout. The bunker at Kelvedon Hatch was enormous, in the event of global nuclear war hundreds were duty bound to made it their home/work space, continuing the administration of Britain into the post-apocalyptic era.

The bunker is a self-serving attraction, staffed by a ragged but rock-hard army of cameras and no-nonsense signs. As you enter through the blast doors of the bunker down a long corridor you start to feel a drop in temperature, a chill in the air and a complete separation from the world outside. You’re guided through the sections of the bunker that haven’t been sealed off by a well spoken actor in a plastic wand. The audio guide is quite long, with a lot of points of interest. The guide maintains a jaunty tone through most of the decent script, although flashes of bottomless despair mark his diction during particularly brutal descriptions, for example when detailing the wide scale euthanasia programme that would roll out following the outbreak of nuclear war. The bunker would have served as a broadcasting station for the challenging times ahead and had space for several high-ranking figures, including the prime minister. One of the many almost grotesque mannequins that decorate the bunker freezes Margaret Thatcher, mid-broadcast. Another, in a sick-bay, recalled Dead Ringers to this tourist. Props, from a variety of sources and time periods as well as some bits of assorted junk, left behind when The Man moved out, decorate the bunker and give some sense of what it would be like to live in this claustrophobic concrete warren of bunk bed lined corridors, strip lighting and mechanical groans and whirrs. Mostly in a ‘I could imagine I’m in actually living in a cheap 80s sci-fi film’ sense although I, for one, did have a couple of near funny turns at the thought of all-out thermonuclear war, during and after the visit.

The tour finishes in a canteen, complete with box to pay the admission and the bizarre surcharge for taking pictures. We also found hot and cold snacks and refreshments as well as one of our party, who’d got bored quite early on, nursing a cup of tea. However, a good time was had by most.

A short history of Kelvedon Hatch
Official site

Theydon Bois

With such an exotic name it might come as a surprise that Theydon Bois is on the central Line.  We went there on a dramatic, balmy autumn day. The vista upon exiting the tube was of a flat common surrounded by trees and there were lots of nice cars and old pubs. Great. We walked up a hill and there was a path. Along the path were a lot of fungi. All kinds of weird blue and red formations clinging to logs and popping up all over the undergrowth. It is illegal to pick mushrooms in Epping Forrest. You can be fined £800.

Next a church with and exciting compost heap, obsessive-compulsive caretaker and well tended graves. I think we could have gone on any number of planned routes through the forest but it was not necessary to ruin the surprises by being organised.

Unfortunately we never found the deer sanctuary. Instead we found swing in an exciting fairly dell type bit with a slope so you can dangle above the carpet of leaves. There weren’t very many people around until we go to the golf course/mushroom field. The next bit was flat and looked a bit boring until we chanced upon a really big pig. Not sure of the exact breed. (Might have been a Kunekune.) The pig was fenced in next to some tidy allotments and very traditional camping facilities. We said it would be great to come out here camping for the weekend and then just go home on the tube the next day!

We thought we deserved a pint and wandered back towards the common and those attractive old pubs. We passed by so many beautiful old houses with quaint little windows, stained glass, turrets, impressive grounds and thatched roofs and considered whether all this would mean that one day we would want to move out to Essex. If you had children here maybe they could turn out like the ones in Enid Blyton books? Maybe the residents of Theydon Bois had the right idea.

On entering the pub we changed our minds quite quickly. A middle aged, nice jumper wearing man forced himself onto our conversation in order to say some quite intolerant things. It seemed like a village pub with lots of middle aged ladies with proper hairstyles and earrings. The men had good jumpers on. The dogs were loyal to their owners and knew how to behave in a pub. The best thing was a rouge, coquettish sausage dog intent on invading the established, suburban calm of a pair of West Highland Terriers.

As it got dark I think we both felt that we’ d earned something. A night out in East London perhaps. Of course so did the rest of CM16 making the tube back a kaleidoscope of undiluted, bejeweled Essex.

Outtripping rating – Normally 5 out of 10 but the weather and the pig pushed it up to a 6.5

Tring

Its easy to get to Tring! Its only forty minutes from Euston. Sadly on arrival you realise that the station is a mile and a half outside the town. However, the road turns out to be rewarding taking you through a pretty wooded area. You can eat blackberries along the way and look at strange varieties of poisonous looking plants.

The usual day trip pursuits like cake eating, tea drinking and lunch in a nice country pub can all be satisfied in Tring. During our coffee and walnut cake we listened to locals discussing the health issues of their horses and other live stock. The shop fronts retain their original character and charm. You could get carried away and imagine you are in a real market town in the 19^th century.

After our walk down the high street, which took about five minutes, we headed to the Natural History Museum (free). Inside there are enough mesmerising displays of stuffed animals in wooden cabinets (including the extinct Quagga, Tasmanian wolf and Great Auk) for it to feel as exciting as its London counterpart. The place has retained its Victorian elegance and the conscientious elderly staff members give the place a creaky omniscience.

The fascinating creator of the museum Walter Rothschild once rode a carriage drawn by six zebras to Buckingham Palace. As a child he kept pet kangaroos and mounted his own butterflies. All this time spent with animals seems to have been because of awkward shyness (apparently he suffered from a “a painful slowness of speech, made worse by a strangely high-pitched flute of a voice”) His family sound like a well meaning, decent lot. They invested in all sorts of things in the town and said that if a towns person was ever unemployed they could come along and get some work from them.

Well, lots of people don’t like stuffed animals. Dead tigers and dogs can be a bit spooky especially if they look a bit down in the mouth. No one had told that to the groups of delighted young children in the museum. They were all squealing with delight and mercilessly competing for the attention of their parents as they tried to pronounce the names of all the creatures.

Overwhelmingly the people of Tring were reassuringly  friendly. I wasn’t aware of the disgruntled intolerance sometimes experienced in affluent areas and commuter villages (apart from one man who got very angry and said that I should be in the display case with the monkeys. Maybe he wasn’t from Tring.)

As we walked back through the town I regretted not being able to stay and watch an outdoor performance of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ at Pendley Manor. Dorian Williams began this annual Shakespeare festival in the grounds of his home in 1949. Tring seems to be thriving on this sort of spirit.

Out Tripping Rating 8/10. Tring is small but offers a great deal.

Don’t Miss -  The 300 acre Tring Park where you might spot a Glis-glis and The Pendley Manor, which is mentioned in the Domseday Book (although there its referred to as Treunge)

Rye

You can buy amazing dressed crabs and pints of prawns from Rye’s fishmongers. The food in the pubs and cafes does not always live up to the Laura Ashley interiors, Chesterfield couches and reclaimed wooden furniture.

Over a short period of time in Rye we experienced disappointing espresso, a disappointing bacon sandwich, disappointing fish pie, disappointing burgers and the world’s most disappointing bloody Mary. This created distrust amongst the group for the gift shops, the toyshops, the toys for pet shop, the vintage shops and the Victorian sweet shop, which were admired from a safe distance. Fortunately Rye Budgens did not let us down.

Nor did the Mermaid Inn, a pub on one of Rye’s most coveted cobbled lanes, steeped in history (some of the cellars in this pub date back to 1156, and in the 18th century it was the drinking hole of smugglers including the notorious Hawkhurst Gang), with dark panelling and narrow corridors. The barman cut through the stuffiness of the hotel bar reserve with his slightly tapped repartee, intimating the haunted nature of the guesthouse, the guests who flock there from around the world, and his role in entertaining them, with his half-macabre, half Lee Evans performance antics.

Down the road from Rye is another out of this world experience, at the Ship Inn in Winchelsea Beach.

A three mile walk from Rye, via fields of sheep, a medieval ruin and a nice stretch of coast, where you can just make out the power station at Dungeness, Winchelsea Beach is a small but bland juncture on the coast; the Ship looks like it might be at best a traditional, and at worst, pretty rough boozer. Nothing can prepare you for the bright brash paint job, the polished faux marble bar, high leather stools and American Diner jukebox that jump out as you open the door.

Outside, the madness continues, with multi-layered garden centre decking and fencing forming a compound-like beer garden, adorned with life-saver rings, candy shop coloured beach huts, anchor themed accessories and sky-blue-painted mortar bombs.

The group grappled desperately to pin down the aesthetics over pints of shandy under an intense sun. “It’s like an Essex boy’s idea of Italy in the 90s” “It’s a mix of South Beach Miami and the Big Brother house” “It’s like the never ending queue to a misconceived theme park ride”. Defeat was eventually admitted and we caught the bus back to Rye.

Back amongst the city walls, surrounded by historic houses, an immaculate bowling green, cobbled streets, the harbour, a bunch of birdwatchers, a wedding shop and a ’traditional pub full of character’ we felt safe and relieved.  

Outtripping rating: 8 out of 10: The unexpected pubs and pub staff easily exceeded the disappointing experiences with food.

Don’t miss: The beach, the dressed crabs, the Mermaid Inn.

Hastings

On a hot bank holiday Sunday full of promise we disembarked at Hastings rail station. We found ourselves in a drab, concrete encased shopping zone where crisp packets blew mournfully past the doorways of Next, New Look and a mysterious looking shop called Shoe Shuffle.

On walking down to the seafront things did not improve; the promenade was grey in colour and several decades past its prime. The sun went behind a cloud and that sinking feeling that you get when you realise you may have made an error in your choice of day trip was beginning to make a dent in our group’s morale. However, we each made a silent decision to make the best of things, after all, if nothing else Hastings offered: ice cream, chips, rock and a massive amusement arcade.

Off the main strip on George Street we discovered a range of independent shops with a diverse target market from Mods looking for Motown records to Goths seeking erotic fantasy figurines. There were also lots of good quality cafes and restaurants and an ancient looking pub called Ye Olde Pump House. As we are getting old and turning into the kind of people who like real ale we sought out The Dolphin Inn Pub. Here they serve the locally produced Dark Star Ale, a hoppy brew not to be consumed before going on the Waltzers. The pub was crowded, loud and friendly.

A point of interest outside the Dolphin Inn is the group of historical ‘net shops’; tall, dark and narrow wooden storage houses for fishing nets which look eerily out of place alongside the burger vans. They are a window into the town’s noble past as a one of England’s most important fishing ports.

Post ale and having spent some time eating cockles, looking at the sea and saying ‘well this is nice!’ we headed for the funicular railway. Everyone loves a funicular railway however this one was really expensive so we walked up the steep steps to East Hill which was more than worth it for the view over the Old Town.

We then walked across the cliff edge for a few miles which was really very beautiful. On our walk we found some sheltered rocks to sunbathe on, trampled though a forest and explored a cave.

On returning to the town, now feeling gregarious and carefree we went on a sea front ride called Speed Wave. This decision was immediately regretted as it got to a creaking start and proceeded to be utterly terrifying and unpredictable whilst having no element of fun involved whatsoever- a bit like spending five minutes with Fred West.

For the remainder of our time in Hastings we occupied ourselves with the more sedate activities of eating chips and throwing stones at a dead fish on the beach. By about 6pm the heart of Hastings’s nightlife was starting to pulse so it felt wise to leave for the relative safety of London.

Summary: Depressing town centre but a quirky old town and surrounded by stunning landscape. Good pubs.

Out Tripping Rating: 7/10

Top tip: If, like us, you’re into psychedelic pagan weirdness check out this yearly festival; http://www.hastingsjack.co.uk.

Margate

We arrived in Margate at 10am and headed directly for Junk Delux. On the way we passed through a small square with a cupcake cafe, vintage shops and a mobile cheese van.

Junk Delux is a huge warehouse and basement, crammed with sideboards, lamps, china, art, telephones, magazine racks, mirrors, vases and other things.

Margate has a few mid-century design shops which are all nice to look in. This one is more set back from the sea and harder to find, but better for scavenging. We lost our friend inside for over an hour and had to lure her away from the bakelite.

Although we came across Grotto Hill, nearby, we did not know that it was home to a subterranean passageway covered in seashell mosaics called Shell Grotto which you can visit.

There are also some caves in Margate which are closed to the public since they were deemed unsafe and the council could not afford to reopen them, so instead we enjoyed the Save the Caves graffiti which campaign groups have emblazoned round the area.

We ate our lunch in The Lifeboat Ale & Cider House. There were no menus but we ordered two lumps of cheese, a sausage and some bread, and drank some of the cider from the barrels which are all on display.

A regular from the pub was celebrating his birthday and congratulating himself loudly about a student at Norwich Art School he used to f*ck called Judy, in between singing loudly to the Beatles album that was playing. He branded us DFLs (Down From London).

When we left the cider house we went to the beach, to walk the dog with us, called Audrey. The wind whipped around us and sent Audrey a bit mental and so we kept the walk to a very short distance and went back to the seafront to shelter.

To add some culture to our daytrip we visited the new Turner Contemporary gallery on the seafront, designed by David Chipperfield. It has been criticised for its resemblance to two industrial sheds but to be honest we were relieved to be out of the wind and were not offended by the modern structure. A large circular window inside faces out onto a car park and the north Kent sea, letting in a grey daylight.

We were back in London by 4pm so the allure of Margate was not that strong. We also missed the Nayland Rock Promenade Shelter where TS Eliot wrote the last verse of The Wasteland. I think the lines he wrote there could have helped us a lot. “On Margate Sands/ I can connect/ nothing with nothing/ The broken fingernails of dirty hands/ My people humble people who expect/ Nothing.”

Even though we were mostly cold and intimidated when we were in Margate there were some real highlights, like the furniture and the cheese.

In 2013 the council plans to re-open Dreamlands, the amusement park that made Margate a daytrip destination in decades gone by. I don’t know whether this will improve its’ day trip rating. I would rather Thanet Council saved the caves.

Summary: Still bleak, despite the cute café offerings.
OutTripping rating: 6/10
Top tip: Try the cheese. Don’t miss Shell Grotto or looking out at the sea from the promenade.