The night was a Cockles & Muscles fundraiser for Margate Pride. Fancy dress was stipulated. Category was: Margate. Organised by legendary club night Sink The Pink, their crew of Queens came down from London in a mini bus to put on a Margate-themed do at the almost-defunct Lido bar. Now as Jill will attest – Jill, back me up! – I LOVE fancy dress. Always close to hand I have a variety of homemade costumes including two Bjork swan dresses and a shell bikini. Mulling over what sort of costume might sum up the Margate theme, I hit upon the idea of Margate’s mysterious Shell Grotto (also a good name for a drag queen).

I didn’t manage it in the end – environmental restrictions on shell shops and a muddled Amazon order left me shell-less – so instead it was back on with the trusty fruit turban. I wasn’t the only person however to imagine dressing as a local building, and on the night, amid the mermaids and Tracy E(r)min’s, the club was dotted with costumes I’d term ‘architectural realness’. Sink The Pink’s House Mother Amy (below) came dressed as the iconic Lido itself, and a young man from Dreamland was dressed up the other towering Margate icon – the massive Arlington House tower block that casts a literal shadow over the main sands.

But by far the best costume of the night, and the most interesting for our purposes, was the girl who came dressed as an estate agent’s sign. The brand she chose is a local one whose boards are just everywhere, but the perfect thing was that it was a ‘SOLD’ sign – a wry comment on the current property boom in this most skint of seaside towns. I’m currently helping my friend house hunt here, and the sign summed it up perfectly. Things are coming on the market then selling within days. To Londoners this may not seem too weird, but in an economically depressed town this is a new, and probably deeply unsettling phenomena. The nationally reported exodus from Hackney to Margate is certainly happening, and with it is coming a whole new wave of energy and enthusiasm for what everyone is making their new home here. But it’s only human for us incoming tide to also worry about the effect we’re having.

My mum, I hope she won’t mind me saying, is of the Baby Boom generation, and I think she feels some guilt (pushed  by the broadsheets) about the idea that her generation have accumulated an unfair amount of property wealth and security. As a near-as-dammit 40 year old I feel guilt that I am only able to have my beautiful flat here due to a quirk of timing. I signed the mortgage in 2007, when all they wanted was a thump print and a smile. And tragically, I suspect that the 30-something creatives moved down here from London also feel guilt – or at least the mixed feelings that come with gentrification. Are we doing more harm than good? Are we kicking out the authentic by moving in and opening vegan salad bars?

I feel sad that there seem to be three generations made to feel guilty by our crazy property market. The Hackney hipsters get so much stick, seen as a plague of organic coffee-slurping locusts wherever they go. In Margate the people arriving – escaping from a crazy situation in the city they thought would be home for life – the creatives, the Queens, the entrepreneurs are bringing life and vitality – just as the previous wave of immigrants to the town, be they Polish or Greek or Italian, did. But it did interest me that these anxieties were made manifest in the costumes we picked out for Saturday night. I’m also glad to report that with a fierce disco and a couple of shandies, wigs and hats were swapped as the night wore on. The end result was a messy mix up of old Margate, new Margate, commerce and creativity – a shame-free celebration with a bit of social satire thrown in. A drag night, in other words.