"I don't know much about that sort of thing, I'm afraid," says the woman at the Nayland Rock hotel. "I should know about Margate's history, but I don't." I am in Kent looking for the seaside shelter where, in 1921, recuperating from a nervous breakdown, TS Eliot had sat while writing Part III of The Waste Land. "On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people who expect/Nothing." Having spent the previous evening in Margate, I know how he felt.
I'd seen a shelter on the promenade, and wanted to confirm that this was indeed the place where I could imbibe essence of Eliot. So far no one has been able to offer reassurance, even though the shelter recently made the news when it was given Grade II-listed status. Margate's visitor centre is closed on Mondays, and the only other person in the shelter when I arrive is a drunk eyeing me suspiciously. There is no commemorative plaque, several panes of glass are broken or missing, and the windows on one side are emblazoned with the words FALSE TEETH in large green letters. It seems a careless way to treat the place in which the greatest poem of the 20th century was written.
I had hoped that coming here to pay homage might move me to write my own state-of-the-nation epic as part of my stuttering campaign to be Oxford professor of poetry. But the words will not come. It doesn't help that I had three pints of Kronenbourg in a forlorn bar on the front last night, and that my head is spinning. The cars on the roundabout next to the shelter sound like . . . damn, I can't even manage a simile in my befuddled state.
Perhaps I can blame the town itself rather than the lager? Almost every shop on the front is boarded up; even the potentially inspiring store selling racy lingerie is closed; and Dreamland, the town's nightmarish leisure park, is derelict. Margate desperately needs a new attraction, and this shelter could surely be it. I can see it now: the Eliot Trail, Waste Land Walks, the Ezra Pound Shop. I may not have written a poem, but I think I have the makings of an urban regeneration plan.