An insider’s guide to Margate with Sheila Lam
Sheila Lam (@sheilalam) is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer whose global perspective informs her cultural commentary. She is the Editor of Faculty Department, and her work has appeared in Wallpaper*, Architectural Digest, Complex, and Travel+Leisure, exploring the intersections of place, identity, and creative expression.
"I first visited Margate in 2018 while living in South London, and it immediately shifted something in my core. Here was a place where urgency dissolved and community lived. I moved in 2020, trading the often relentless pulse of London for something more essential. My days now are surrounded by sea breeze as I fly around town."
"For me, Margate often feels like living in the town from Kiki's Delivery Service."
Madre
Within the bones of the old post office, Madre lives as a weekly call for my partner and me. The rotating sandwich menu reads like a seasonal almanac, where each composition is a meditation on ingredients at their moment of perfection. But the deeper communion happens between strangers who become neighbours across the shared table. I’ve made so many friends by simply bumping into one another often at Madre that we've joked it would make a great premise for a podcast.
Doubloons
Once a nomadic pop-up wandering Old Town's corners, Brit and Michaela anchored their vision on Northdown Road. Doubloons crafts small ceremonies of attention and detail. My ritual order is their ginger matcha lemonade paired with an oat honey hojicha. Everything possible is conjured from first principles: fresh-pressed juices, syrups that require the patience of alchemists, even their own sweetened condensed milk for Spanish lattes from scratch. The space itself feels like stepping into someone's living room reconstructed with vintage IKEA pieces and a late 90s CD player, creating a temporal collage of modernity and nostalgia.
La Cantina
Stepping across La Cantina's threshold transcends the English Channel entirely. This extension of Bottega Caruso shifts form from fresh pasta counter and provisions by day, to a wine bar as weekend evenings unfold. The clinking of glasses creates its own percussion while small plates emerge bearing the essence of Sannio's mountains, each bite a translation of terroir and memory.
My partner, raised in Margate, remembers when Bottega Caruso first arrived nearly a decade ago as one of the early signals that something was stirring in this coastal town. Now, watching La Cantina's evolution, we witness not just a restaurant's success but a community's deepening relationship with authentic flavours and the stories they carry.
Roanne Toosy Yoga, Aligned with Asa, and James Shaw Pilates
When the sea's vast presence requires balance from within, I seek the guidance of friends who understand the body as landscape. Roanne leads open classes at Margate Yoga Studio on Northdown Road and Union in Ramsgate, while Asa and James craft reformer Pilates sessions in studios that feel suspended between earth and light.
Each practitioner brings their own intuitive mapping of the body's rhythms. Roanne, with her ability to unlock spaces we didn't know were closed, Asa and James weaving strength in every motion. Their studios become temporary sanctuaries where breath and movement realign what daily living has displaced.
TKE Studios
Tracey Emin's TKE Studios exists as creative mythology made manifest. Within these walls, emerging and established artists participate in Margate's ongoing reinvention of what artistic community can become. The studios pulse with an urgently contemporary energy, housing up to a dozen artists whose practices seem to draw directly from the town's particular creative frequencies.
I was fortunate to interview Tracey for Wallpaper* when TKE opened, witnessing firsthand her vision of art not as a commodity but as an essential conversation between place and possibility.
Formerly known as Haeckels
Perched on Cliff Terrace like a trellis between land and sea, Formerly known as Haeckels offers treatments and deep relaxation. The signature seaweed wrap becomes a ritual transformation of warm kelp, dissolving the boundaries between self and ocean while reflexology promotes stillness that exists beneath all surface turbulence. Emerging from these treatments feels like surfacing from another realm entirely, while the adjoining shop offers talismans crafted mere steps away. Products that carry the essence of a therapeutic encounter home, extending the medicine of place beyond the temporary embrace of the treatment room.
*Sheila’s feature was filmed before the new rebrand of FKA Haeckels. The shop and treatment rooms' location remains the same.
Manston Riding Centre
A couple of years ago, I experienced an absolute revelation through horseback riding at Manston Riding Centre. Under Jen's expert guidance, instruction seasoned with the particular humour that comes from a lifelong partnership with horses, I navigate private lessons during weekday quiet and weekend sessions alongside twelve-year-old girls whose fearless skills both inspire and humble me.
These encounters with horses become lessons in presence, communication without words, and the particular joy found in activities that demand complete attention while offering no guarantee of mastery. Here, surrounded by fields that roll toward the distant sea, I understand something essential about Margate's gift, the way it creates space for becoming rather than simply being.