Margate's surroundings are its best asset, and the sea is only half of it. The average home has a park or open space around the corner. Open water is barely half a kilometre away. There's a wind farm on the horizon and motorbikes racing on the sand twice a year. People argue about the town, but the setting is hard to argue with.
Green space is close. The nearest park or open space is roughly 150 metres from the average home, and there are about 17 within a kilometre. Albion Place Gardens is the registered historic garden in the town. The rest is ordinary, useful grass: somewhere to walk the dog or take a child who needs tiring out before tea.
Water is closer still in practical terms. The nearest blue space, which means sea, lakes, ponds or rivers, is about 530 metres away on average, and there are about 23 within a kilometre. In a town built around one very large piece of blue space, that's hardly a surprise, but plenty of seaside towns manage to keep most of their housing well away from it.
For getting further out, the National Cycle Network is about 640 metres away on average, and about 49% of postcodes count as close to it. There's no ancient woodland here. The countryside around Thanet is open farmland and coast, not old forest.
The town centre is fuller than its reputation suggests. The rated-premises data counts 975 shops, 75 pubs and 121 restaurants, plus 295 holiday lets, which is what you get when a resort has spent two and a half centuries catering for Londoners.
Air quality across the Thanet council area measured about 7 micrograms per cubic metre of fine particles in 2024. That's a council-wide figure, not a reading from your street.
The character comes from the named places. The Scenic Railway at Dreamland and the old Dreamland Cinema anchor the seafront. Turner Contemporary sits next to the harbour. The Thanet Offshore Wind Project, completed in 2010, is visible from the seafront, which gives a Margate sunset a row of turbines in the middle of it. Further inland are Salmestone Grange, the Dent de Lion gateway and Draper's Windmill. Margate Beach Cross brings quads and motorbikes onto the main sands in spring and autumn. Hartsdown Park is home to Margate F.C., which currently plays in the Isthmian League, lower than the club once did.
For private outdoor space, the area has about 85,000 square metres of garden for every 1,000 residents. It's a coastal town with a lot of converted flats, so plenty of people have no garden of their own, and the parks and the beach make up the difference.
The business valuation list has 2,165 rateable premises in the area. Shops are by far the biggest category, with offices next, then the premises that serve visitors. These are premises on a list, not a count of businesses open today, and some of those shop fronts will have changed hands since the last valuation.
For eating out, about 94% of the 546 food businesses with a hygiene rating hold the top score of five, and about 1% sit at the bottom of the scale. So your fish and chips are very likely to come from a kitchen the inspector was happy with.
On protected landscapes, there's no area of outstanding natural beauty and no ancient woodland, and only a sliver of the Thanet Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest overlaps the area, well under 1% of it. That isn't a failing. The landscape here is the coast and the town, not a protected countryside with planning restrictions attached.
Margate's surroundings are one of its real strengths: parks close to every door, the sea a short walk away, and a seafront with more going on than its critics expect. Most days, the area around the town is what makes the case for moving here.