Key: Is Kent the Westchester of London?

Written By Unknown on Senin, 21 Oktober 2013 | 18.37

In Turner Contemporary, in Margate, the gallery workers were hanging a new exhibition: works by J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and their peers, a collection of rarely seen early-19th-century landscape sketches offset by the shark skin and whale spine of the Irish contemporary artist Dorothy Cross. The floor was littered with cables and vacuum-cleaner components, masking tape and Stanley knives. It was a scene that could have been straight out of a gallery on Cork Street, but instead the few visitors were able to look out over the water to where the North Sea meets the English Channel.

Laura Barton for The New York Times

Paul Breuer, left, and Matt Dawson, owners of Breuer & Dawson, a vintage clothing shop in Margate, and Ally Blackgrove, an assistant at the shop.

Kent may not yet be a suburb of London, but this county — down and a little to the east of the capital — now finds itself the subject of the city's hoggish sprawl. Hastened by a high-speed-train link from the city, trailing restaurants, galleries and boutique hotels in its wake, the once-languishing county has become a new destination for those who want London access if not a London address.

Turner Contemporary opened on the Margate seafront in the spring of 2011. It was a controversial undertaking, a $27.7 million gamble in a town better known for its boarded-up shops than its creative community. But the county was already in the midst of a transformation. While the British economy has yet to regain its equilibrium from the 2008 recession, home prices in London press ever upward. The impasse of demand's outstripping supply has led to high valuations, bidding wars and the contemplation of the city's farthest reaches in the hunt for property and space. With the introduction of the Javelin trains in 2009, Kent is now — in public-transport terms — closer to central London than some of the city's own boroughs. The new trains make the journey from Ashford to London a mere 37 minutes. The trip from Margate is under an hour and a half — a hefty chunk of time, certainly, but traveling to work inside London can take an hour. Over the past five years, Kent's population growth rate has been higher than that of the national average.

Kent's renewal is perhaps also about the resurgence of localism in Britain — an embracing of the national landscape, cuisine and character; a bridling at chain stores and big business; a dreamy imagining of growing kale and keeping rosecomb chickens in a town where the butcher and the baker haven't been beaten out by the big supermarkets.

But this overspill of people from the capital requires a fundamental shift in character for the county; what we are now witnessing is the establishment of a London interpretation of a rural idyll — one in which there is sea and sky and broad pastures but also the ready availability of all the delights you might expect in a capital city: independent coffee stores, art galleries, modern dining and specialist ingredients.

Paul Breuer and Matt Dawson have worked in the vintage-clothing industry for two decades. Dawson relocated to Kent from London in April last year, drawn, like many Londoners, by the allure of good schools and the notion of a picture-book childhood for his children. "Initially coming here was about the kids, really — fresh air, live by the seaside," Dawson said. "But now it's nice to be somewhere vibrant, on the up." We were standing among the vintage cashmere, brogues and braces of their shop, Breuer & Dawson, in the old quarter of Margate — a knot of winding streets and pleasingly crooked buildings now populated by cupcake cafes, retro furniture stores, a pub that offers a locally sourced menu and an alluringly named tea shop, Lady Tesla's Loose Leaves and Mud.

"Margate went down furthest and came up quickest," said Breuer, who has lived in Kent with his family for 10 years. "It's kind of the last area in Britain that's as close to London as Brighton" — a town in Sussex often referred to as London-by-the-Sea — "but a world away in terms of attitudes."

Margate is not the only engine in Kent's revival. The port town of Folkestone, for instance, has gained a reputation for public-art projects, including the Triennial, which in 2011 commissioned 19 works from international artists, some of which now stand permanently on the streets of the town. Not so very far away are Hythe, Deal, medieval Sandwich and Whitstable, home of a Michelin-starred restaurant, the Sportsman. Along the coast lies Broadstairs (famed for being the place where Charles Dickens wrote "David Copperfield"), which, during the town's recent food-and-drink festival, hosted a pop-up by Bistrotheque, the irreverent bar and restaurant in London's hipster enclave Hackney, run by Pablo Flack and David Waddington. All the "farms and groves and orchards, salt-marsh lamb, people making wine," Waddington said, make the county an appealing location for an up-and-coming restaurateur, because all that is "mixed with the landscape, where suddenly the sky opens up and the light goes on forever."


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