Following the success of its inaugural edition in January 2025, Off Season—Margate’s completely free, pop-up arts festival—returns in 2026 with more than 150 exhibitions across the seaside town.
Created by the artists of Margate for Margate, Off Season was born from a simple question: how do we bring life to the town during the quiet winter months? The answer transformed the town for a weekend and brought the community together.
“Margate heaves with life during summer—packed beaches, queues for fish and chips, buzzing arcades,” explained the festival organisers. “But winter tells a different story. While many of us love the blustery beaches and cosy pubs, those who depend on footfall face the difficult task of weathering the quiet months.”
The inaugural festival in January 2025 exceeded all expectations. With a small team at its heart, organisers created a website and map and invited people to self-organise exhibitions across the town. In response 70 individual exhibitions popped up in arcades, garden centres, private homes, shop windows, and galleries. Over 3,000 postcards were distributed to homes in the Cliftonville area, inviting residents to participate.
After the festival ended, many businesses reported takings comparable to the summer months—a remarkable achievement for what is typically the darkest time of year, especially for small and independent businesses.
“Margate faces many challenges, and it can be frustrating to see this glossed over in articles about the town,” the organisers said. “We face high levels of deprivation and youth unemployment for example. But at its heart there are a great number of people trying to make things better.”
Off Season 2026 has already received some 150 listings, more than doubling the inaugural festival’s participation. The festival’s principle is art is for everyone—anyone can put on an exhibition for Off Season, making it a celebration of the entire community.
Among the exhibitions is Baby, It’s Cold Outside taking place from 23–25 January.
Featuring works by Charles Williams, Lily Hughes and Jay Rechsteiner, the exhibition explores how we experience the outside world from within the shelter of home. Paintings, objects and video are presented in a space normally associated with comfort and privacy.
Drawing on humour, everyday life, memory and wider social realities, the exhibition examines how meaning is shaped through fragments of information, personal experience and imagination.
The exhibition at 24 Prices Avenue, Margate is open during the day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
On Friday, Jay Rechsteiner will serve spaghetti, integrating a simple domestic act into the exhibition experience.
On Saturday evening, the exhibition programme expands to include poetry readings and a curated selection of short films.
Friday — Opening Day noon–9pm Exhibition open Spaghetti served during the day Informal conversations and drop-in viewing
Saturday — Exhibition & Evening Programme noon–6pm Exhibition open. 7pm-9pm Curated open mic: poetry, short readings and short films
Sunday — Exhibition noon–5pm
Wheelchair accessible
Another exhibition is called Stick Around at Salon, 101a Northdown Road from now until 18 January, and then at The Grain Grocer, 216 Northdown Road from 23–25 January.
The show brings together more than a dozen Thanet-based artists working with collage, to explore the ways the art form can provide vital relief from mental health challenges.
Collage provides an easy access to being creative for everyone, as it often makes use of found or low cost materials. For Stick Around, 17 artists including Max Boxer, Poppy Cockburn, Imogen Herd, Shringi Kumari, Tara Li-An and Lucy Lyons will exhibit collages. The diverse group – many of whom usually make work in ways other than collage – features work large and small that shows the diversity of collage as an artform. Some work creates surreal montages of images, some is humorous, some is overtly political, and some celebrates paper, texture, and the process of collage itself.
For the show’s opening week at Salon, there will also be collage materials on hand, in case any visitors want to have a go at making their own collage. Artists invigilating the exhibition will be on hand to provide encouragement – and practical tips.
The exhibition is raising awareness of local organisation STAK.life – Stefan’s Acts of Kindness, which was founded by Emma and Tristan Kluibenschadl, whose son Stefan died in 2022 after struggling with his mental health. All the artists will donate a percentage of any sales to the organisation, to support the work they do with neurodivergent young people.
Professor Daisy Fancourt’s book Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health is published this week. Based on medical studies involving tens of thousands of people and extending over decades, it shows that the arts can have huge impacts on health. Fancourt says to get the full benefit, people need to engage with art in the real world, not on a screen: listen properly to music, take part in a play, spend time looking at a picture, or make their own work. People who do so experience a range of benefits, which reduce costs for health services in the future.
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health can be ordered from The Margate Bookshop, 2 Market Place.
is there no end to this art rubbish ? its being flogged to death now
It’s not my sort of art, but I have to give these people credit for organising and accessing public funding i.e. they are fully aware of how to gain access to free public money, now there is an “art” to jumping through the loopholes regarding the funding processes. For example, I recently wanted to do some short online refresher courses, in fact in total I wanted to do twenty. It would have cost me just over eight hundred pounds, but because I reached out to a government funded body and “declared” I was a volunteer in the community. The organisation was more than happy to pay in full for me. The lady asked me, “think of something you do?”, after considering I said, I pickup litter outside my house once every two weeks, just the width of my garden on the grass verge. That was enough for the submission form. Her response, “therefore you are volunteering in the community”. Both parties were happy, I had my training needs fulfilled for my job for free and the local organisation was able to declare to their funder they had paid for twenty courses. After I had them completed in early December, the lady reverted to me, asking “would I spend more money” because they needed to demonstrate cascation of funding each month. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t think of anything else to spend money on! But it is a good example of how to play the system of gaining access to taxpayer’s money.
No public funding has been used in putting on this event.
Exhibitors and organisers are paying for it.
If it’s not your thing hey-ho but at least determine the facts before cumming on your keyboard Gerard