The Old Town, the High Street, and the argument Margate is having with itself

Stand in Market Place in Margate's Old Town on a Saturday afternoon and you are in one of the better small shopping quarters in the south-east of England. Vintage clothing, second-hand books, ceramics, records, a deli importing directly from a village near Benevento, a museum devoted entirely to crabs. Walk five minutes inland up the High Street and you are somewhere else entirely.

Both are Margate. Any guide that shows you one and not the other is selling you something.

What the Old Town actually is

It is the tight grid of lanes immediately behind the harbour: Market Place at the centre, with Broad Street, King Street, Lombard Street and Duke Street running off it. It is small. Ninety minutes covers it at a browse and half a day covers it thoroughly, so do not allocate a whole day and then wonder what to do at two o'clock.

The anchors worth naming, because they keep more reliable hours than most:

• The Margate Bookshop on Market Place, open seven days, a curated shop rather than a stock-everything one.
• Crab Museum on Broad Street, first floor above the Pie Factory Gallery, with its own entrance. Free by policy, permanently, and it says on its own homepage that it will never charge and might go bankrupt. Half an hour, and funnier and more serious than it sounds.
• Bottega Caruso at 2 to 4 Broad Street, with its wine bar and deli Cantina Caruso at number 8.
• Paraphernalia on King Street for homewares, open Thursday to Sunday only.

The pattern in that last line is the important one. A great many Old Town businesses close Monday and Tuesday, and a great many have no website at all, only a social page. That is not disorganisation; it is what a shop with one person behind the counter looks like. It does mean Wednesday to Sunday is the real Old Town week.

What turns over, and how fast

Research for this guide confirmed four permanent closures of places that appear in recent published coverage of Margate: Dory's on the High Street, Roost in Cliftonville, Hantverk and Found on King Street, and Lombard Street Gallery. Two of those were still being recommended in guides written within the last couple of years.

So: check anything before you travel for it specifically. And be sceptical of the lists. Margate's independent scene is genuinely good and genuinely volatile, and the two facts are related.

DFL

You will hear the acronym. It stands for Down From London, it describes people who moved here from the capital, and it is used across a range from affectionate to pointed depending on who is saying it and about whom.

The underlying situation is not a caricature on either side. Property prices in Margate rose sharply after Turner Contemporary opened in 2011, in a town where wages did not rise to match. That is straightforwardly bad for people who already lived here and were renting. At the same time, a real number of businesses now employ real people in a town that badly needed employers, and several of them are run by people who moved here and stayed.

What makes the argument specifically Margate rather than generic is that both halves are visible from the same spot. Northdown Road in Cliftonville was named by Time Out as one of the world's coolest streets in 2025. It runs through one of the more deprived wards in the district. Those are not competing claims; they are the same street.

The numbers, since they exist

Thanet District Council recorded a shop vacancy rate of 22 per cent for Margate in 2023 to 2024. Ramsgate was 12.5 per cent, Broadstairs 5.8 per cent, and Westwood, the out-of-town retail park, 3.9 per cent. Margate had the highest vacancy of the district's four centres by a wide margin.

In August 2026 the council issued formal statutory notices on nine long-empty commercial properties under High Street Rental Auction powers, which allow a council to auction leases on persistently vacant units to independent businesses and community groups. The Margate streets named in that process included Cecil Square, Hawley Street, the High Street, Lombard Street, Marine Terrace, Market Street, Queen Street and The Parade. Some of those are streets you will walk down while shopping.

There is one more figure that explains the shape of the problem better than any of the others. Tourism across Thanet was worth £349 million in 2023 from 4.6 million visitors, but only around half a million of those stayed overnight. A day-trip economy generates a lot of footfall and comparatively little of the revenue that keeps a high street tenanted.

How to walk it

Do the Old Town properly and then deliberately keep walking. Go up the High Street past the station end, look at Cecil Square, and come back down. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the single most useful fifteen minutes you can spend on understanding the town.

The best thing you can do commercially is straightforward: buy things. Not from the chains at Westwood Cross, and not entirely online afterwards. The shops in the Old Town are the ones carrying the risk.