Ernest Chin, Year 5

Margate Place-holder

The project asks: what if regeneration strategies placed locals at the core of their interventions? A speculative response to the Margate Town Investment Plan 2020 and Margate Town Deal 2021, the project seeks to realise a scheme that is truly ‘For Margate, by Margate’, proposing a year-round intervention that empowers the local community to reclaim Margate and improve it on their terms, instead of being externally-driven as it has been thus far.

Centred around locals, the scheme is a self-build ‘Place-holder’ community centre for Margate‘s everyday. Over the years, Margate’s popularity as a tourist hub, as well as its eventual decay, have been well documented. Improvements have largely aimed to leverage tourist activities and creatives, focusing on the Turner, Dreamland and the town centre, which have spruced the town up but are largely out of sync with residents‘ lives. Inverting this, the project aims to maximise local from the perspective of materials, construction, target audience and legacy. The area of focus for the project is the first of three proposed phases of the Place-holder.
Sited on Walpole Bay Green, at the intersection of the coast, the green and Cliftonville, the building utilises the abundant chalk underneath the site as the primary building material, alongside recycled material gathered from around Margate. Locals construct the scheme, gaining experience and knowledge through a series of chalk workshops taught first by professionals, before the baton is handed to locals as more experience is gained. In this, the scheme draws from the land and the people.

Ultimately, the project aims to question the top-down manner of regeneration strategies and new projects, suggesting an alternative approach where the process of local involvement, material use and collective building provides the platform for a bottom-up, intrinsically local strategy that is truly relevant to the lives of Margate’s residents.