Dreamland & Arlington House, Margate: Art Deco vs Brutalism by the Sea

It’s one of the most recognisable British seaside sights: the Art Deco facade of Dreamland, proudly presiding over the vast expanse of Margate Sands. 

And looming above it, taller than anything else for miles, the brutalist concrete tower of Arlington House. 

This is the story of one of Britain’s most perfectly contrasting modern architecture pairings, and what they tell us about the life and death and life again of this iconic seaside town.

This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different remarkable story each week.

An amusement park born from the railway boom

Margate was one of Britain’s earliest seaside resorts. Wealthy Londoners would travel down to escape the pollution of the city, bathe in the sea, and breathe in the fresh sea air they believed would cure all manner of ills.

The town’s wealth grew and grew from this industry – and we see this all along the seafront, in the peeling Georgian and Victorian pleasure homes. 

In the mid 19th century, the town got its first railway terminus, built by the South Eastern Railway (not actually on the site of the current station, which came later). And it was here that Dreamland’s story begins.

During the railway boom, companies were fiercely competitive, sort of like a historical Apple vs Microsoft. It’s the reason you often get major stations right next to each other (King’s Cross and St Pancras being the best known example), and it’s also how Dreamland was accidentally born.

To rival the South Eastern Railway terminus, London, Chatham and Dover Railway bought the site next door: at that time nothing more than a reclaimed salt marsh. They completed their new terminus in 1866 – but it never opened to the public.

The empty railway terminus quickly went to other uses, and became known as the Hall by the Sea. After a brief stint as a restaurant and dancehall, it was transformed into Victorian pleasure gardens by circus proprietor George Sanger – complete with, of course, a fake ruined abbey.

The building that still defines the seafront

By the 1920s, Dreamland had become a proper amusement park. It was now owned by one John Henry Iles, who owned theme parks all over the world. It was he who gave it the name Dreamland, inspired by a trip to Coney Island. He also gave it the Scenic Railway – a wooden rollercoaster, now over 100 years old and Grade II listed.

And finally, in 1935, came the building that still defines the town. The wonderful art deco Dreamland Cinema, directly influenced by German cinema design of the 1920s, was the first building of its kind in Britain.

It was so influential that it became the prototype for the Odeon house style, inspiring the picture palaces that soon appeared in high streets across the country, including George Coles’ wonderful cinemas across London. 

This was the golden age of British picture palaces, and Dreamland was ahead of the curve.

Just a few years later, Dreamland was requisitioned for the war effort. Its restaurants were used as treatment centres for the wounded, its ballroom a makeshift dormitory for troops.

Brutalism fails to revive a declining town

Before the war, Margate had 30 first-class hotels. It was a booming tourist town, and you could see it in its buildings.

But after it, the town was in trouble. A catastrophic North Sea storm surge in 1953, which killed over 300 people along the east coast, destroyed much of the remaining seafront infrastructure. Barely two of those 30 hotels survived into the 1960s. Margate desperately needed reinvention.

The answer, or so planners hoped, was concrete: the bold, uncompromising concrete of Brutalism, a movement that believed it could reshape how people lived.

And so came the huge, concrete monolith of Arlington House. Eighteen storeys of brutalist concrete, advertised as “Britain’s first park-and-buy shopping centre with luxury flats”.

It’s a bold piece of architecture, and almost as controversial now as it was then. The facade was built to mimic concrete waves – and one of the coolest features is how these waves were cleverly angled to give every flat a view of the sea.

But despite all this, it was a disaster. The 1964 clashes between Mods and Rockers on Margate’s beaches had made national headlines, cementing the town’s reputation as a place in trouble. Just a year after the flats meant to revive the town had first opened, they were almost entirely empty.

Decline and revival

Like many UK seaside towns, Margate entered an accelerated period of long decline from the 1970s, as cheap international travel boomed. Dreamland went through years of limbo: sold, sold again, closed, subjected to arson.

Now, though, something is shifting. Every time I visit the town, it feels like another art gallery has popped up. Even on a misty early March morning, coffee shops were filled with trendy twenty-somethings who wouldn’t look out of place in Hackney.

The revival is real and happening at pace. Dreamland itself is part of it – it reopened in 2015, reinvented as a modern amusement park during the Summer, and a gig venue throughout the year.

Arlington remains controversial for the way it dominates the skyline with its loud concrete waves. But walking along Margate Sands that misty morning, I was struck by the contrast of the two buildings.

The pre-war Art Deco glam of Dreamland, a symbol of optimism even in the uncertain mid-1930s, juxtaposed against the concrete promise of a modern future that never quite arrived.

Two very different ideas of what tomorrow should look like, clashing up against each other, in a seaside town that refuses to stop redefining itself.

Read more building of the Week posts

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