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| Islands of Conversation |
Margate has been part of Andrew for most of his life.
Born in London, quickly moved to Margate with occasional flits between the two,
smog to salt, smog for longer and then salt returned. Andrew’s livelihood,
Giorgio’s Italian & Mediterranean Kitchen has been part of me for most of mine.
Childhood spaghetti slurps, my sister and I leaving tomato fingerprints on
menus, since returned as adults for more dignified, fork twirling, fare. My conversation with Andrew confirmed the
parallelism of life in Margate, different strands existing alongside one
another but not always coinciding. ‘Margate’ as something in common gave us an
equivalent starting point but also confirmed a separation of perspectives, not
just because Andrew had more years on me but because there was of course more to see. There is always another
side to every story. We were upstairs in Kabuki, another of Andrew’s ventures,
the bar above Giorgio’s. Andrew faced outwards, looking at Margate, his profile
faced me. His arms were folded. His speech mapped and envisaged the trajectory
of the Margate he existed within, it was meditative and full of pauses,
occasionally elongated. “There’s loads I
could tell you, where do you want to start?” I asked about the restaurant, that
I had so often frequented. “Come
outside”, he said.
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| Unreadable, unpredictable Giorg- |
Looking outside-in, Margate’s history and its tidal
trade came alive with Andrew. He pointed to restaurants, that once dotted
Margate’s Marine Drive, now only existing by virtue of his gesture towards them:
“if you look along the seafront, see
where that blue sign is, ‘Beacon Bingo’ – just next to that there, there was
another restaurant, that’s where our family – when they kind of moved down here
- that’s where they started.”
Members of Andrew’s family would come down from London for ‘the season’,
to help out in the restaurants that other family members owned. Note the
definite article in ‘the season’. It
was the late 60’s, early 70’s and it was a season that guaranteed trade and
tourism. It was before Giorgio’s even existed. I had always seen Giorgio’s as a
sustainable restaurant that had made a living, despite tourists coming and
going. Locals were as regular as clockwork, surely? I was drawing on my own
perspective here, my sister and I habitual returners. But, as Andrew pointed
out, the location of Giorgio’s, not quite ‘Old Town’, nor right upon the
seafront made it infuriatingly difficult to predict. “I can remember, even now, the first or second bank holiday weekend we
were open […] we’re sitting down there with all the staff waiting for an influx
of people. Margate was packed, it was boiling hot weather – everywhere was
busy. In Giorgio’s, we had 5 people in the restaurant at 1 o’clock lunchtime,
and that’s when I realised it was difficult for people to find us.” For
Giorgio’s, there were no guarantees, visitors were not definitely tourists, nor
were they definitely locals. Trade was indefinite and it fluctuated massively,
despite the enduring charm of the place, not least of Andrew himself.
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| -ios |
Andrew has seen, interacted and dined with change. He
proceeded to take me through menus that chronicled changing tastes and changing
customers. A menu from the late 70’s with a hotch-potch of Italian and French
influence, offering something other than traditional ‘Fish ‘n’ chips’. Then he
produced a menu from over 10 years ago. I remembered this. Andrew traced over
prices in order to date the artefact: “how
much for a margherita pizza, 4 pounds, steak 10 pounds… desserts a couple of
quid – yeah something like 10 years old I reckon”. My 8-year-old self used
to mimick this gesture, tracing choice, settling on the familiar. My family and
I consistently satiated by the familiarity it offered and would go irrespective
of whether it was “the season” or not. Margate, different then, weathered, weathering.
Before the Scenic Railway had burnt down decimating Dreamland, but also before
the Turner Contemporary and its cultural impetus had been realised. Margate was
poised between regeneration and desolation but Giorgio’s stood, overlooking the
seafront, survived, surviving. In a sense it lived in parallel to the town,
existing alongside it, aware of its presence but not necessarily suffering its seasonality.
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| Ebb and flow: eager tables empty and fill |
This also worked in reverse. I, buoyant in my view of a
Margate revivified by the Turner Contemporary and ever increasing footfall
along the seafront stretch asked about the impact, if any, that Giorgio’s had
felt from the ‘revival’. Andrew paused and ‘umm’-ed and confessed; “when the Turner crowd came along, we
found it was difficult to get them here. A lot of the impact is down the road,
the harbour area and that’s great for them down there but not so good for us –
we’re kind of an island, a bit in the middle of it all, with the triangle of
activity around us – its like a Bermuda triangle sometimes – we’re kind of
erm…” “Lost?” I said. Andrew answered; “Yeah…”
A pause ensued. There was a real sense that despite the influx of tourists,
Giorgio’s was very much marooned in Margate. Andrew needed to find a way of
putting it on the map. Here, his creativity and resilience that had forced
Giorgio’s to endure came to the fore. Having resisted conversing explicitly
with the tourist trade, that had dominated Margate in the 70’s and 80’s, it was
time to indulge them once more. I had seen (and been highly amused by) Andrew’s
take on a saucy postcard (see below). I probed Andrew’s thinking – “what
prompted you to use that image?” “People
had always said to me, you know, we can’t find you, so I started kind of
wandering around and thinking, right what can I do to make the building more
prominent, and I was standing by the clock tower looking up and I thought –
well I’ll just put an arrow on the building saying ‘we’re here’, but then I saw
that postcard in a feature in the newspaper and I thought that’s perfect.” Donald
McGill’s postcards – from which Andrew drew inspiration - were banned in 1954
for their sheer and utter indecency. They were, however, inordinately popular.
Andrew confirmed the appeal of seaside seediness, “everybody laughs […] sometimes an advert like the postcard just seems
relevant for the time…”
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| Seaside sauce momentarily stultifies monochrome |
Andrew’s creative resilience said something about
Margate and the sustainability that creativity has so often induced for the
town. We went backwards, further into Andrew’s trajectory. Andrew had helped
out at the family business in Margate, then known as ‘The Thanet Restaurant’
until he was 16 when he went to Art College to study graphic design. “Did you ever draw on your coastal background
as inspiration for your art?” I asked. “Not,
at the time, I don’t think there were a lot of Margate influences, though
certainly on the photographic side, I used a lot of the scenery that is still
kind of being photographed now… you know, Margate – the sea’s the same, but
there’s always someone with a slightly new perspective, new buildings on the
eye-line… the Turner contemporary etcetera…” Andrew’s pairing of something
iconic for the town with an understated ‘etcetera’ confirmed that he saw, eyes
first. His Margate was uniquely visual and by implication he was able to plot
its pitfalls, sketch out its fluctuations and map Margate accordingly. A distracted
train of thought emerged as we discussed Margate’s art scene. Andrew had travelled up on the train to
Medway for three years to Art College. Tracy Emin also travelled up on the same
train with Andrew to Medway during this time. Sometime later our conversation
flicked forward to Andrew’s year in the smog after Medway, “My father was ill […] and ironically, I was
trying to get into Saatchi and Saatchi – Saatchi being who picked up Tracy
Emin’s work – and bought her bed. But right at – literally within the first few
months, I came back to help out with the business here – then my father passed
away and I stayed.” Here our conversation paused for a moment, the clock
tower chimed. Fractions of each life, of Tracy’s and of Andrew’s, emerged in parallel,
for an instant only, before being devoured again by the divisions that life and
its tick-tocks had inflicted.
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| Clocking up tocks |
It was clear that Andrew had lived Margate, really
lived it. He had run his hands along the buildings, seen it, felt it, inhaled
it. I trusted what he saw. He sighed, “I
was looking at the seafront up until about here (he gestured from Arlington
House to Giorgio’s) the other day as I
walked down, and literally half of it is kind of missing now because of the
fire that was there (he pointed to the hole in the parade)” There is, of course, an acknowledged
resurgence of healthy activity in Margate. There is no denying that. There are
also stark visual blots where change has yet to infiltrate. Andrew, an
unacknowledged visionary, attributed this to the town’s disjointed layout and
the lack of natural flow between Old Town and the beach and Marine Drive, life
within each resuscitating, surviving, and remaining respectively. The places
tread on in parallel to one another but with partitions in between, the
irregular, unmentioned heartbeats of the High Street thrumming behind. The need
for our conversation to identify what binds the contrasting portions of life in
Margate together was clear.
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| Resolved to love |
“What kept you here, in Margate?” I found myself
asking. “It’s the fact that I’ve got family
here, we’ve kind of settled here…” he said, he paused. Having spent
considerable time acknowledging Margate’s flaws Andrew proceeded to defend it “Look, I love Margate, its not… but its just
you want it to be busier, for business and for everyone to have the kind of
life that you would want to lead. Even though I was born in London, all my
memories are of Margate.” The defence lulled and nostalgia grew. Andrew and
I spoke of becoming immune to seaside splendour. Intermittent moments of
appreciation intruded on this immunity for both of us. Here, we were to
coincide. “I remember when I used to come
back from college after a couple of weeks and you’d get off the train and you’d
look down (at the seafront) and think
– you know, its great, and you look again and you think – yeah – no – its
nice.” He paused. Many have lived this same moment in parallel to Andrew, I
have, and maybe you have. Opening the door of the train station and letting the
sea and the sand and the town swamp you again - it was coming home, a home weathered
but still surviving. Courage and endurance lures, the sea decorous with salt
scatterings, forcing “an undergoing stomach, to bear up/against what should
ensue”. I left the conversation, feeling uplifted in spite of the
acknowledgement of our sea-sorrow. I had
been privileged to see a glimpse of an unexposed but incessantly creative mind.
Andrew was an incredibly astute and diligent observer of Margate, impressively
resilient to its tidal turns. Confirming Margate as ‘home’ had been a fleeting
moment of concision, we were now to return to parallels again.
You can find Giorgio's 50 metres from the big clock, 19 Marine Gardens, Margate, Kent, CT9 1UH and via www.giorgiosmargate.co.uk
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