Name: One Ocean 2026: Margate's Coastal Identity
Start: 2026-06-20T13:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-06-20T14:00:00+00:00
Location: One Ocean 2026: Margate's Coastal Identity

Talks & Tours

One Ocean 2026: Margate's Coastal Identity

Entry

Free entry, donations welcome

Date

Sat 20 Jun 2026

Time

1–2pm

Location

Foyle rooms, Turner Contemporary

Book tickets

Grounding the weekend’s conversations, this panel explores Margate’s deep and evolving relationship with the sea, from its history as a seaside resort to its present-day cultural revival. Speakers will reflect on how coastal identity shapes community, heritage, and future possibilities.

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About the Panel

Polly Brannan—Artistic Director, Open School East

Polly Brannan is an artist, curator and educator. She’s committed to producing public art, social practice, strategies and programmes collaboratively with artists and communities, co-commissioning with them to create new work for the cities and places we live in. She is inspired by user-led design and the methodologies of learning through play.
Since early 2021 she has been the Artistic Director at Open School East in Margate, UK, a free, independent arts school and community space in Margate, was Education Curator at Liverpool Biennial 2012-18 and Education Curator at Serpentine Galleries 2011–13. She is Founder and Artist with network Avant Gardening and was a member of art and architecture collective, public works 2005-2011.
She has curated, delivered and produced commissions and projects internationally including: Triangle Network Fellowship, Ethiopia; Istanbul Biennale 2017, Turkey and Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India 2018; Making Worlds, Stiftung Künstler*dorf Schöppingen, Germany 2025.

Phil Hubbard—Professor of Urban Studies, Kings College London

Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Urban Futures Research Group at King's College London, UK. He is the author of Cities and Sexualities (2012), The Battle for the High Street (2017), City, Second Edition (2018), Borderland (2022), and co-editor of Key Thinkers in Space and Place, Third Edition (2024), among others.

Dan Thompson—Artist and Historian

An award-winning social artist and writer, for over 25 years Dan has made entertaining, thoughtful, and quietly provocative work about places, people, and the stories that connect them.
Gently radical, he has worked across England and Wales, co-creating work with diverse groups of local people – making festivals together, creating town-wide games, producing poster campaigns, creating alternative community centres, and publishing unlikely written histories.
His work creates social capital, activates overlooked and underused spaces like empty shops and old buildings, and demonstrates a DIY approach to art, culture and social action. It is full of hope and optimism.
Dan is committed to a regenerative creative practice. He has been finding ways to involve more people and a wider range of people in the arts for 20+ years, and this has included community commissioning, shared curation, and co-creating work with other people.

Amber Massie-Blomfield (Moderator)—UK arts consultant, producer and writer

Amber Massie-Blomfield is Director of Fern Culture, a company empowering the arts community to act on climate. Formerly executive director of Complicité, she's produced acclaimed international theatre projects, and as an author she's written extensively about the transformative potential of arts, including her recent book 'Acts of Resistance: the power of art to create a better world'.

One Ocean 2026 is a weekend of free talks, workshops and screenings on art, adaptation and the future of our oceans. Supported by the UK National Commission for UNESCO, Turner Contemporary presents a rich public programme of talks, documentary and artist film screenings, workshops and community activities. Through art, science and storytelling, One Ocean translates complex environmental issues into accessible, action-driven experiences.

View the full programme