Retail Week’s summer road trip takes us to the Southeast, where we see Kent’s seaside regeneration and the thriving retail scene in Marlow.

Margate seafront

Retail Week on the Road

Home to oysters and clapboard cottages, Whitstable is now an established destination for Londoners looking to get away from the city’s stresses and strains.

With the arrival of the DFL (Down from London) crowd, the seaside town on the East Kent coast has become gentrified, with boutiques taking the place of junk shops on the main thoroughfare, Harbour Street.

What was once The Harbour Lights pub, a biker rendezvous point until a drugs raid forced it to close its doors in the early 1990s, is now the Hotel Continental with an art deco façade that wouldn’t look out of place in a Poirot adaptation.

But it wasn’t always like this.

“These houses used to be black with grime,” Kent County Council cabinet member for regeneration and economic development Mark Dance, who grew up in the town, tells me as we meander along the seafront admiring the now pristine dwellings dotted along it. They now sell for the best part of a million.

Just 17 miles down the road lies Margate. Like Whitstable, it’s been the subject of multiple column inches in the weekend broadsheets.

The town is home to the Turner Contemporary gallery, opened in 2011, and the kitsch fairground attraction Dreamland, which made its debut two years ago.

Decades ago, Margate was a hotspot for British holidaymakers but fell out of fashion with the advent of cheap air travel. With the tourist money gone, the town soon fell into poverty and disrepair.

Then in 2011 it was selected as one of 12 “Portas pilots” – rundown towns picked out for retail regeneration efforts by ‘Queen of Shops’ Mary Portas when the Cameron Government took office.

But six years later and there is little evidence of the regeneration efforts on Margate’s seafront. A main road, flanked by flashing arcades, unbranded pound shops and down-at-heel pubs runs parallel to a crowded sandy beach. Genteel Whitstable it is not.

Woolworths Margate

Woolworths Margate

Woolworths in Margate is one of only former branches to remain vacant

The high street is the same, with charity and phone unlocking shops aplenty with the only national chains Boots, CEX exchange, McDonalds and a couple of banks.

A boarded up Woolworths – one of only four in the country still vacant – and a former Primark sit opposite each other at the end of the street, while a cavernous Store Twenty One, empty but for a couple of racks of 50% off clothing, sits alongside.

But here, the tide suddenly changes. Peer round a corner and you’re greeted by boutique hotels and vintage clothing emporiums.

This development of Margate’s Old Town has seen Londoners begin to set up home, although they’re by no means as big a presence as in Whitstable.

But it’s not just the occasional canny Londoner who has spotted its potential.

Hedging their bets

Less than a year after Dreamland was opened, funded by £14m of taxpayer money, owner Sands Heritage entered administration.

The collapsed company was then propped up by hedge fund Arrowgrass, run by former Deutsche Bank traders, with which Sands Heritage already had an established business relationship.

“The fact that private equity sees the potential in the town should mean that other businesses follow suit”

Later in the administration process, Arrowgrass became the 99% shareholder of the business and the effective owner of Dreamland and a number of other seafront properties owned by the firm.

The private equity firm’s interest in the town is both a gift and a thorn in the side of Thanet District Council.

While its millions saved the much-publicised Dreamland from falling into disrepair once more, the project was originally not-for-profit, with all proceeds being ploughed back into the town’s regeneration efforts.

And the firm’s interest in the town doesn’t stop there.

“They want to dominate an entire corner of Margate,” says former councillor Ian Driver. “And the council is gifting half of the seafront to them.”

He alleges that Arrowgrass is now set to take over the management of projects that were previously due to be tendered for and is in line for picking up land for housing developments. Thanet District Council disputes this, saying that the tendering process is ongoing. 

But whatever your take on the ethics of Arrowgrass’ interest in Margate, the fact that private equity sees the potential in the town should mean that other businesses follow suit, speeding up the pace of regeneration and further reviving the retail scene.

Deliveries to London

The centre of town is not the only area of Margate to feel divided to a surreal extent.

It’s the same dichotomy on nearby Northdown Road, except here the different types of business sit cheek by jowl: greasy spoon ‘Happy Cafe and Family Restaurant’ is right next door to the ‘The Grain Grocer’ selling quinoa and the like.

Peering inside, you see that their patrons couldn’t be more different.

Rat Race Margate

Rat Race Margate

Rat Race, Margate

Margate is an entirely different kettle of fish to nearby Whitstable; it’s bigger, much more urban and consequently regeneration efforts both take longer and are often more jarring.

“People forget that 50% of the children living in the Northdown Road area live below the poverty line,” says social artist and writer Dan Thompson, who moved to Margate four years ago.

“You have a disadvantaged population, a drug problem and a high level of crime. I bet that eight out of 10 of the people here have never been inside the Turner Contemporary.”

But he’s cheered by the fact that local retailers are cashing in on the metropolitan crowds that spill out of the station every weekend.

We walk by a locally run warehouse filled with retro and vintage furniture. Outside a board reads, ‘Deliveries to London’.

“Margate has always been about taking money off Londoners,” Thompson smiles.

He’s involved with the high street regeneration efforts, helping to bring about mixed use spaces such as a keep-fit centre and adjoining cafe for older people.

Another mixed use space is Cliffs: a cafe, hairdressers, yoga studio and record shop all in one which roasts its own coffee beans out the back.

Its owners, Ed and Kier, use their music industry links to host club nights in the basement, where they also run film nights for 50p donations.

It’s clear that however conflicted Margate’s two worlds might seem, the Portas town is slowly, slowly coming into its own.

Marlow: The town retail’s entrepreneurs are flocking to

Sitting on the banks of the River Thames, the Buckinghamshire town of Marlow is attracting much of retail’s top talent.

Boutiques run by figures such as Kim Winser, responsible for the turnaround of Aquascutum, and the duo of ex-M&S fashion boss Kate Bostock and former Monsoon chief executive Rose Foster pepper the upmarket streets.

Kate Bostock and Rose Foster at the opening of Angel & Rocket

Kate Bostock and Rose Foster at the opening of Angel & Rocket

Kate Bostock and Rose Foster at the opening of Angel & Rocket

Bostock and Foster have just celebrated the first month of trading at their childrenswear shop Angel & Rocket.

Foster says that trading has so far been very positive and adds that Marlow is the ideal base for such a venture.

“It’s a lovely place,” she says. “The shoppers are perfect for our brand. The landlords have worked quite hard to get an interesting tenant mix. There are boutiques like us but high street retailers too.”

Angel & Rocket is joined by Sainsbury’s Local and WHSmith alongside the likes of Jigsaw, Mint Velvet and The White Company.

With Marlow attracting the likes of Winser, Bostock and Foster, there’s no telling how many more of retail’s luminaries might decide to set up shop here.

The grocery disruptor with world class ambitions

When posh purveyors of frozen food Cook opened its first store in 1997 in Farnham, Surrey, it took £1,150 in its first week.

Fast forward 20 years and it has 104 stores across the UK and turned over £50m last year.

Posh frozen foods shop Cook is thriving

Cook

Posh frozen foods shop Cook is thriving

The business is thriving and has notched up double-digit like-for-like growth over the past nine months, surging ahead of the majority of food retailers.

Cook’s is committed to making sure that all the food it sells is cooked as it would be in customers’ homes from the kitchen at its head office in Sittingbourne, Kent.

But it hasn’t been always been easy: Cook experienced significant cash flow problems as the 2008 recession hit and nearly ended up going bust.

“When I look back I realise that we had completely lost our way,” co-founder Ed Perry says.“We recruited the wrong people and lost the plot in the carnage of the recession.”

However, the tide has definitely turned and Perry is focused on growth.

“We make 93% of what we sell in our shops ourselves,” he says. “So people have always thought of us as more on the manufacturing side. But we have ambitions to be seen as a world-class retailer.”