Come friendly bombs, Betjeman wryly wrote, and fall on Slough. Actually, I don’t mind Slough. It has some impressive roundabouts. But Margate? Now you’re talking about a blot on the landscape that could disappear overnight without a murmur of lament, at least from me.

Come, friendly tides, and flood Dreamland! As poetry it may not quite sing like Betjeman, but as a sentiment it’s irreproachable. Margate’s grotesquely tacky, yet unaccountably “celebrated” amusement park should have been torn down decades ago. I was taken there each year as a kid and, even in the 1960s, it seemed as ancient as Stonehenge, only in worse condition. Reading in The Times that it not only still exists, but may soon reopen as a “heritage fairground”, as part of a £60 million plan to turn Margate into a chic “cultural destination” (no, this isn’t April 1), was like being told that the NHS is acquiring medieval pliers for a return to heritage dentistry. The only pertinent question is not when or how — but why.

The saddest thing about Margate is that it probably can’t even claim to be Britain’s grottiest resort. “Margate was invented to make Rhyl look good,” a Welsh friend says. But is even Rhyl the nadir? I’ve been in livelier graveyards than the scene I saw in Weston-super-Mare when I visited Somerset’s seaside “jewel” in August last year. The promenade was deserted. Cafés and clubs were boarded up. The pier was burnt down. Half of the seafront’s illuminations were on the blink. And this was Bank Holiday Monday! OK, it was raining, but rain happens. In the 150-odd years since the Victorians invented the seaside, our resorts should have learnt to deal with the vagaries of our weather.

What to do about our ailing seaside towns? If a makeover by Sir Alan Sugar’s apprentices doesn’t work tonight (and I sense that their attempts at “blue sky thinking” will entertain for all the wrong reasons) Margate will apparently put its faith in art. A new “Turner Gallery” is being built, celebrating the great JMW’s regular visits. The council hopes that this — and the Tracey Emin connection — will attract trendy young artists from the lofts and squats of East London, turning Thanet into a kind of Shoreditch-on-Sea.

Times Archive, 1923: Margate Ho! with Cockney shipmates

Let the man who travels to Margate go by steamer and his journey will be touched with magic

• Letter to the editor: Margate, 1869

• Attracting visitors to Margate, 1936

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That’s not exactly an original plan. The Cornish towns of St Ives and Newlyn have long traded on their arty links. So has Brighton and, in recent years, even once-staid Hastings and its even duller sidekick, St Leonards. Artists are actually the one group of people who love the seediness of our seaside resorts. It makes them feel plugged into gritty reality. Also, rents are cheap. But I doubt whether an influx of wannabe Damien Hirsts will halt a decline in the British seaside that’s been going on since the first package holiday charter jets took off in 1950.

What will? Something more drastic. Where there’s no will or money to restore all those rusting Victorian promenades and piers to the pristine state that will delight rather than repel visitors, the eyesores should be removed — and to hell with the heritage guardians and their antediluvian squeals. That applies to Brighton’s Grade I listed West Pier, now just a tragic tangle of struts; and it certainly applies to Margate’s Dreamland and hundreds of other near-derelict “attractions” round the coast.

“But what should go in their place?” the planners cry. Well, what about nature? Clear the cliffs of crud, and give visitors more of what they come to the coast to enjoy. Views, briny breezes, unspoilt beaches, bracing walks. The cries of gulls and roar of breakers. The lonely sea and the sky. “In Britain,” noted that observant Polish seaman, Joseph Conrad, “men and sea interpenetrate.” Yes, we do — given half a chance. But often the ghastliness of “the seaside” gets in the way.

So banish the dismal amusement arcades! Maybe 80 years ago they were amusing. Now they are magnets for petty criminals, dealers and addicts, pimps and truant kids. Shackle that unholy mix to the endemic dole culture of many failed seaside towns (more than a fifth of the citizens of Margate, Rhyl and many other resorts are on benefits) and you have another reason why the middle classes shun the British seaside. Who wants to holiday in a B&B next to a dosshouse for vagrants? Who wants their nippers playing on a beach where addicts discard needles? And that’s as likely to happen in palmy Torquay as oikish Clacton.

Then learn from success. Despite what you may think from reading this lament thus far, it does exist. Chaste, sedate Bournemouth has turned itself from Costa Geriatrica into the clubbing capital of Dorset (OK, not much competition) without sacrificing its spick-and-span gentility. Whitby, magnet for Goths and literati alike, has cashed in on its vampiric associations, cliffs and romantic ruins without unduly coarsening its appeal. Millions now come to Cornwall for Rick Stein’s food and Tim Smit’s Eden Project — a 21st-century ecological playground that has symbolically revitalised a disused clay pit. And there’s a string of seaside villages in north Norfolk that attract thousands of discerning visitors simply by keeping themselves as dapper, unspoilt and bracing as they were when the boy Nelson was paddling on the shingle.

These success stories couldn’t be more different, except in one respect. They have all turned their backs on the hopeless burgers-and-slot-machines ethos that clings to the British seaside like a mouldy shroud. As a nation we are far more discriminating, cosmopolitan and demanding in our leisure tastes than we were even 30 years ago. Cinemas, gyms, stadiums, cafés, supermarkets — every business that wants to flog luxury items or pastimes to the public has had to raise its game, otherwise it would go out of business. Only at the seaside do traders and local authorities imagine that they can woo crowds with food, facilities and rides so squalid that they should be treated as toxic waste.

I’d love Margate to shed that image — because if Margate can, anywhere can. And in a year when nobody except freeloading MPs can afford a foreign holiday, there’s never been a better time to instigate a renaissance of the British seaside. But time is running out. If the rot isn’t stopped soon, the British public may soon be applying George V’s alleged last words — “Bugger Bognor” — to a great many of our famous old seaside resorts.

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