Folkestone Harbour & Seafront Regeneration
Folkestone was once a small fishing town, considerably behind in its development when compared to other coastal towns in Kent and Sussex, but it became a thriving and fashionable seaside resort, complete with a railway connection to London and a Cross-Channel port. It can boast the world’s first pillar box, the first telephone kiosk, and the world’s first beauty queen. John Logie Baird had a shop here, and made the first television transmissions to another shop in the town in the 1920s. At one time Folkestone had had the highest density of Rolls-Royces in the world per head of population; it even had two of its own R-R coachbuilders.
But at the height of the towns reputation as a destination for the Upper Classes, along came World War I and Folkestone saw major changes yet again. Folkestone became the main transit camp for troop movements to the front line in northern France, and it is said that there were about ten million troop embarkations here. However, the image of Fashionable Folkestone had taken a pasting, and after the cessation of hostilities with high taxation and the decline in spending power of the better-off, the atmosphere became rather more cosmopolitan.
The Second World War had even more dire consequences. Folkestone was in the ‘front line’ and took a battering from air-raids as well as a big gun across the Channel. Much of the population, by then 50,000, was evacuated, leaving a rump of about 10,000 for most of the six years of the war. After the war the town took a dive down market, and many of the fine old buildings were demolished, to be replaced by ugly ‘modern’ constructions and the town lost favour with the fashionable people who had formerly made the town their own. Folkestone became very much a holiday destination for day-trippers. Folkestone, like many seaside towns, was badly affected by the advent of cheaper foreign travel in the 1970s. The opening of the Channel tunnel, which led to the closure of local ferry services, compounded the problem. This led in turn to a depleted economy, low skills base and "dangerously high levels of family breakdown", according to a recent report commissioned by the government. Some of the town’s neighbourhoods rank among the most deprived in the country.
A recent think-tank said on key measures of poverty - school failure, teenage pregnancy, fatherlessness and lone parenting, and worklessness - some resorts now had problems as severe as deprived inner-city areas. Over half the inhabitants of Folkestone belonged to the lowest 20% of the population according to the government's deprivation index.
But things are changing here. Folkestone has seen substantial regeneration, including the creation of a Creative Quarter in its rundown old town, at the hands of former Saga boss Roger de Haan. Local businessman Roger De Haan sold the Saga group for £1.35bn in 2004 and established the Creative Foundation in 2002. Since then, more than £60m has been spent on refurbishing the Creative Quarter, centred on the Old High Street. This is all part of his dream to revamp the town where he and his family live. I have created this album to record the changes that are taking place in Folkestone, they are basically a photographic record, not a display of carefully crafted photos! I have lived here now for almost thirty years. Had I known back then that much of what I then saw around me would disappear I would have taken more photos, but then again this was before the advent of digital photography and I saved my film for what I considered more interesting subjects like holidays and family photos. But I can at least document the current changes.
