Ramsgate, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

20 May 2022

Escaping your hometown is, I feel, an integral step in growing up. We all know those who stuck around, either at their parents or down the road, eventually to settle down with a likeminded resident, who never fully left the nest, start a family, and eventually have affairs or lose their minds. They're lovely people, just easy targets.

Ramsgate is a coastal town of just over 40,000 of these types. Ramsgate is the end of the line, literally. You can’t really get further southeast on this god-forsaken lump of land. The trains from London all terminate at Ramsgate rail station – so you do have a few London commuters settle in Ramsgate (those who don’t have the means to live in Whitstable, Margate, Broadstairs or Faversham). But most of the Ramsgate’s population live and die in Ramsgate.

An oddball of a town; Margate’s slow cousin. It tried its best to hop on board the Shoreditch-on-Sea, avocado-on-sourdough, totebag-and-anorak gentrification train (calling at £6 Pint Way and AirBnB Boulevard) and it’s a textbook victim of the death of the British High Street. It’s a ghost town with a Royal Harbour and the country’s largest Wetherspoon’s.

A working-class Conservative stronghold, full to the brim of the disenfranchised and bitter. The population is overwhelmingly white, with a handful of those from Asian backgrounds. A nasty atmosphere hangs over the seaside town, but it was never as bad as it was during the Brexit referendum, since it belongs to the infamous South Thanet Parliamentary Constituency. Yes, that one. The one that where Nigel Farage ran in 2015 (losing out to the only man somehow worse than Nige; Conservative party clown - Craig ‘Whack It on the Expenses, why the fuck not’ Mackinlay) and the one that where The Brexit Party got 46% of the vote share in the European elections of 2019. So, as you can imagine, it wasn’t a great place to be in 2016.

I grew up and lived in Ramsgate until I was 14, before my dad lost his job and we couldn’t afford the mortgage anymore. My friends all lived there, as well as a large majority of my extended family, I went to secondary school in Ramsgate, we had Ramsgate beach, King George VI Park, the Granville cinema – there were never much of a reason for me to leave. I also belonged to the Jehovah’s Witness congregation of ‘Ramsgate East’ so not only went to bi-weekly services at Ramsgate’s Kingdom Hall but spent every Saturday morning dragging my feet across its pavements, having doors slammed in my face after asking strangers if they wanted to hear the good news. I knew the streets better than most.

After moving away, I would return every day for school, but that was about it. I got a new group of friends who I would get the train to school with, so I left a lot of Ramsgate friends behind. After I left school and left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had no intentions of setting foot in the town again. It was riddled with bad memories and childhood trauma; I projected all those feelings on to the town itself.

The first time I remember properly going back to Ramsgate was after a guy I went to school with (and occasionally talked to about The Smiths in ICT) invited me to a record fair at Ramsgate Music Hall, to which I attended and bonded over vinyl with said ex-school friend (who went on to become my best friend and one of my life’s few loves). But alas, he lived in fucking Ramsgate.

So, when we started hanging out it more and more, the more time I spent in Ramsgate. Crashing at this house, getting drunk in Margate and taxiing back in the wee hours, going to various café’s either hungover or still drunk. It was never the place to drink, but it was the place to be hungover. The streets sympathised with you, it seemed like they shared your headache and dry mouth. Plus, like I said before, it’s a ghost town so it was always quiet and easy to find places to get a fry-up or a pack of B&H and a full fat Coke.

Ramsgate had it’s hold on me again. I’d go out Friday night, and either crash on my friend’s sofa or wait until the 6am train back to mine. Sometimes if he fell asleep early, I’d go out at 4am and take a long walk around the town before going to the train station.

I’d visit these places that are a part of me whether I liked it or not. The Kingdom Hall, my school, the house my dad grew up in, the park next door to that house where I played in with my aunts. Every time I did this, I would sit for around an hour at 5am on the memorial bench for my aunt that is in that park. She died of cancer at 23 when I was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12, so I have fond memories of her, she was more of a sister figure than an aunt. Sitting there I would think about Ramsgate. My town. It will always be mine. From the station to the park, it is all mine. And I never wanted something to be mine less.

Nostalgia is a powerful and painful feeling. I think I hate it.

Ramsgate is the siren, nostalgia for youth its song. The sharp rocks that beckon your ship is a defeatist acceptance that we are the place where we grew up. We do live and die in these towns; we just must try and avoid them at every step in between.