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People digging on Folkestone Harbour beach
Local people and tourists digging on Folkestone’s harbour beach after Michael Sailstorfer buried 30 bars of gold. Some are still searching. Photograph: Steve Tanner/PA
Local people and tourists digging on Folkestone’s harbour beach after Michael Sailstorfer buried 30 bars of gold. Some are still searching. Photograph: Steve Tanner/PA

Why the digging has never stopped in England's gold-rush town

This article is more than 8 years old

Folkestone Digs ‘participatory artwork’ turned into a documentary of despair as local people grasped at the chance of escaping poverty

Folkestone’s gold rush began last August, when 30 bars of bullion worth a total of £10,000 were buried in a strip of sand just inside the Kent town’s tiny harbour. The new prospectors who descended on the beach were unwitting contributors to what was billed as a “participatory artwork” – although most were perhaps more interested in a slender chance to redeem lives blighted by poverty.

The German artist Michael Sailstorfer conceived Folkestone Digs as part of the town’s Triennial arts festival. It attracted huge media attention: ITV breakfast, BBC news and even Chinese state television broadcast live from the town. Folkestone’s Creative Foundation, which runs the Triennial, counted 119 articles in regional, national and international media, 14 radio and television stories and more than 200 online articles attracting more than 1.6bn hits.

Sales of digging tools including trowels, shovels and spades increased by almost 500% at the local B&Q store. “The digging has never really stopped,” said local reporter Dean Kilpatrick. “There are fewer people on colder days, but the coldest day I went there was in February and there was still one guy digging away. There were even people there on Christmas Day.”

Sailstorfer’s artwork has essentially become a documentary of despair. Regular visits to the short, sandy beach under the shadow of the harbour wall found the vast majority of diggers were unemployed or low waged. In September, Michelle Moorin, 41, was digging with spades, pieces of wood and her bare hands. She had been unemployed since the shop she worked in closed almost a year earlier.

Michelle Moorin digging for gold. Photograph: Maruxa Ruiz del Árbol

Moorin had moved to Folkestone from Yorkshire when she was eight. “I couldn’t believe all the lights and the noise,” she recalled. “It was like arriving somewhere magical. In my teens it was brilliant – you could go out every night. There was always something going on. Now everything’s just empty and wrecked.”

In October, John Knott, 39, was working the beach with a metal detector, which he bought soon after losing his job at HMV when the music chain collapsed in 2013. He spent hours prospecting for discarded metal, and had been to the beach a few times. “I’ve found some coins and a couple of pieces of jewellery so far, but no bullion,” he said. “I saw a couple find a piece yesterday – watched them dig it up – and they just hustled off without saying a word to anyone.”

John Knott working the beach with a metal detector Photograph: Maruxa Ruiz del Árbol

Three weeks later Becky Rachman, 23, was working the same patch as Moorin. She had read on Facebook that four bars had been found there, and decided to give it a try. “I’ve just been made redundant,” she said. “I used to work in publishing but that’s over now, so I’m a gold digger.” She laughed. “It’s better than sitting around watching telly.”

The three wards that border Folkestone harbour – Folkestone East, Folkestone Harbour and Folkestone Harvey Central – are among the poorest in Kent. David Adlington, the priest in charge of St Peter’s church, perched on the hill above the harbour, said: “The parishes around the harbour have been very badly affected over the past 20 years. I think it’s in questionable taste at the very least to bury gold under the noses of the poor as an art stunt.” A third of the children and one in five working adults in his parish are living in poverty.

In both Folkestone Harbour and Folkestone Harvey Central, about 10% of the population are unemployed. Men in Folkestone Harbour have a life expectancy of 73 years, six years lower than the national average and seven years lower than in nearby Folkestone Park. Over the past 10 years, hospital admissions for drinking and drug taking in the area have been rising.

The Folkestone Triennial is funded by Roger de Haan, a local man who sold the Saga group for £1.3bn in 2004. He decided to invest much of the money into the town, which was clearly in dire need.

Ferries to the French port of Boulogne used to operate out of the harbour and Folkestone was built – and flourished – on the tourist and fishing trades. Tontine Street, now a seedy area with a reputation for drug dealing, boasted glamorous boutiques and the Orient Express ran through the town on its way to Paris.

In the 1970s, the port handled about 75,000 passengers, 4,000 cars, 50 coaches and 400 lorries each month. But in 1994, the Channel tunnel opened, taking most of the cross-channel traffic, and accelerating the town’s decline. In 2001, the port closed, and its railway station followed eight years later.

“Folkestone has been left behind,” said Richard Bellamy, manager of the Rainbow Centre, a church-funded homeless charity. “There’s has been a tremendous lack of investment, it’s very hard to gain employment – and that’s key to getting people to help themselves out of homelessness.”

The centre offers everything from help with laundry facilities, assistance with official forms and advice on accommodation to supplies of emergency food every weekday morning. The numbers using its services have soared: up 67% between 2012 and 2013, and another 27% the following year.

“We’ve also seen greater prejudice towards our clients, I think,” said Bellamy. “The vast majority have lived in the world of work, want work, and want the dignity that work brings. Employment’s key. If there’s work to be done, people generally want to do that. If there isn’t the work, people just spiral down and feel less hopeful about the future. The vast majority don’t want quick fixes, they want to live ordinary life well. No one wants to be saved by gold buried in the sand.”

In many ways the dream of regeneration in Folkestone is a dry run for the dream of a post-industrial UK, mixing a billionaire, cultural industries and high-speed rail networks, a small-scale simulacrum of the government’s plans for redeveloping the north of England.

A poster from an earlier age, promoting rail travel to Folkestone. Photograph: Getty Images

HS1 – the country’s first high-speed rail link – began running in 2009, and De Haan’s investment in redevelopment should be flushing the town with cash. Folkestone’s Creative Quarter should be packed with shops and tourists. The economy should be bubbling.

“In fact, the whole of east Kent has slightly underperformed against the rest of the south-east since HS1 opened,” said Richard Wellings of the thinktank the Institute for Economic Affairs. “The [train] ticket prices are sold at a premium, making it too expensive for commuters and families looking for a seaside day out. It’s like Doncaster, which has had high-speed rail for 30 years and is still one of the most deprived parts of the country.”

Even the art world is dubious. JJ Charlesworth, associate editor of the London-based international art magazine ArtReview, who moved to Folkestone six years ago, is “very pessimistic” about the regeneration possibilities of events such as the Triennial.

“I don’t really think that art has very much to do with poverty at all,” he said. “I don’t necessarily see [art-led regeneration] having any immediate effect in Folkestone.” However, Charlesworth added that the Creative Foundation’s major investment in the town has made it “more viable as a commercial and residential area, to a quite significant degree”. But of art-led regeneration in general he said: “It is too easy to parachute a biennial or a triennial into a community. Often [they only benefit] investors and property developers and don’t benefit local people.”

Neither De Haan nor Sailstorfer were willing to be interviewed by the Guardian.

Back on the beach, there are said to be 22 pieces of gold left in the sand. On a recent spring day, Graham Sopp, 53, watched the digging, unable to join in due to an injured shoulder. A Falklands veteran who served on HMS Conqueror, Sopp lost his job as a supermarket security guard as a result of the injury, and he and his wife found themselves homeless.

“We’d sit on a bench on the cliffs, and we’d wonder if anyone would miss us if we jumped off. But we’re fighters. We stuck around,” said Sopp. The couple have now found a home – thanks in part to the Rainbow Centre – but last month Sopp found lumps on his neck and groin, and is waiting for the results of a biopsy. “We come down and watch people digging, and sometimes at low tide we have a look to see if the sand’s been washed away and there’s gold,” he said. “But there never is.”

This article was amended on 20 April 2015. JJ Charlesworth did not say that the Folkestone Triennial would “possibly … raise shop rents”, as an earlier version suggested, and further revisions were made to the quotes from him in order to better reflect his views, in particular his qualified support for the Creative Foundation.

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