Ruth Guilding

Places, like property prices, go up and down. Margate, in the most northerly corner of Kent, is just beginning the uncertain journey upwards again. The county’s largest resort, it has acres of ribbed brown sand and a harbour enclosed by a pier, ending in a lighthouse. Margate thrived when Turner painted there, and London workers arrived by daily packet for a waft of ozone, cockles and jellied eels. There are tall terraced houses in Regency stucco and Georgian brick, and knapped-flint cottages; a gloriously kitsch Winter Gardens, a shell grotto and the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, sponsored by George III. There is also the wreckage of mass tourism — bingo, Butlins, arcades, the boarded-up wastes of Dreamland Fun Park and a defunct Lido and Scenic Railway.

Compton Verney House has reopened for its second season, continuing its founder Sir Peter Moore’s aim of bringing art which is under-represented elsewhere in Britain to a new audience. Alongside landscape paintings by the 17th-century Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa is a larger, thematic exhibition, Only Make-Believe, curated by Marina Warner, who brings to the task a weight of experience. Spread out through several rooms in the house, the show is more about her thoughtful intimacy with the subject than just the simple sum of its themes and exhibits. Its gurus are the child psychologists and educationalists Friedrich Froebel, Melanie Klein and Maria Montessori with their benign interrogation of the psychological and cultural aspects of child’s play.