Margate has turned up in more music videos than most people realise, right up until the moment they start counting. The Libertines shot Run Run Run on these streets in 2023, then recorded a number one album in a building on the seafront. Rag’n’Bone Man filmed here in 2024. David Guetta and John Newman used the Roller Room at Dreamland. Mimi Webb, Circa Waves, Lava La Rue, Maisie Peters, Calum Scott, the list keeps growing and shows no sign of stopping. Margate has no shortage of music video locations. What it has lacked, until recently, is an easy way to book them.
That is the bit this guide fixes. None of the appearances above happened by accident. Directors keep coming back because the town reads as genuinely distinctive on camera without costing a London location-agency day rate to access. What has been missing is a straightforward way to hire the specific interiors that make Margate useful, by the hour, with prices you can see before you commit.
So here are the seven spaces on Creator Spots that suit music video work, what each one is good for, and the practical stuff worth knowing before you load a crew onto the high-speed train.
The honest reason is not mystical, though the town would probably prefer it if you assumed otherwise. Margate has a visual identity that is immediately recognisable and coherent without being worn out. Any urban backdrop that reads as London in a music video is now quietly competing with thirty years of other videos shot in London. Margate reads differently. The Victorian seafront, the gothic edges of Cliftonville, the deliberately strange interiors of Dreamland, the pastel Old Town, all of it has the quality of a place that grew its own aesthetic rather than being built to resemble somewhere else.
Then there is the light, which is the thing cinematographers tend to notice first and mention last, as though admitting it feels like cheating. Margate faces north, and the coastline produces a soft, diffused, consistent light that holds up across most of the day. It extends your practical shooting hours and spares you the contrast problems that make outdoor and interior sequences a nuisance to cut together. It is the same light that kept dragging Turner back here, and the reason Vivienne Westwood’s team chose the town for a recent campaign. You do not have to care about any of that to benefit from it.
For a director, the upshot is simple. Indie, gothic and alternative concepts get atmosphere that would cost a fortune to build. Nostalgia and coastal aesthetics get instant visual shorthand. And anything that needs a real interior with a point of view gets options that do not require a six-figure production budget to unlock.
Each of the seven spaces below is bookable by the hour through Creator Spots, with no fees charged to the production. Rates are transparent and confirmed at checkout. No day-rate minimums on the hourly bookings, no location-agency commission, no surprises. The seven cover wildly different aesthetic registers, so the useful way to read this section is to find the one that matches your artist and your concept, then ignore the rest.
If you would rather see the lot in one place, you can browse all available spaces and filter from there. Otherwise, work through the listings below.
This is the one with the strongest existing music video history. The Libertines own and run The Albion Rooms, filmed Run Run Run in Margate, and recorded their 2024 number one album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, inside the building. When a director shoots a band here, they are shooting somewhere real music actually happens, which is a quality that is almost impossible to fake and very easy for an audience to feel.
There are several distinct looks inside The Albion Rooms listing. The main bar is a gothic lounge with a gilt fireplace, an arched mirror, a leather throne chair, candlelight and sea-facing sash windows that throw strong directional light through the morning. The basement bar is the grungier sibling, all booth seating, fairy lights, vintage posters, a checkerboard floor and a leopard print stage, a completely different mood that pairs well with the main bar across a shoot day. There is also the recording studio, dressed with warm wood panelling, red velvet, a drum kit, amps, a piano and guitars. It is a genuine working studio on the Miloco network, which is exactly what makes it such a convincing visual backdrop on camera.
One important booking note, and it is specific to the Albion Rooms. The standard hourly rate covers photo and film shoots only. Live music performances, rehearsals and recording sessions are not covered by it. So for a music video shoot, or anything that involves live performance or recording at the venue, contact the Albion Rooms directly to arrange it rather than booking a standard hourly slot. This is how their music video bookings are handled, and it means the shoot can be priced and scheduled properly for what you actually need. Note too that bookings are one space at a time. If you want more than one room, say the bar and the studio, that is a separate booking for each.
The seven hotel rooms are the other option worth knowing about, each individually styled in black and gold with chandeliers, leather and bay windows, the sort of dramatic single-artist interior that would be a real find at this price in any city.
From £20 per hour for photo and film shoots, Monday to Saturday, 9am to 5pm. Music video shoots are arranged directly with the venue by enquiry.
Best suited to: indie rock, post-punk, gothic, dark pop, alternative and punk. Filmed performance and narrative work that wants real musical heritage in shot. Dramatic single-artist pieces in the hotel rooms.
A complete change of register. Le Keux Vintage Kent and Frock n Roll is a fully dressed studio on Northdown Road with five distinct styled sets inside a single booking, which makes it the most efficient space on the list for a concept that moves through several looks. The work a set dresser would normally charge you for has already been done, and done with commitment.
The five sets run from a 1950s American diner booth in red vinyl and chrome, to a vintage dressing table with a salon chair and props, a pink-walled kitchenette with a baby blue larder, a hood hairdryer and pink salon corner, and a pastel meeting room. Natural light runs throughout. For a pop, retro or Americana concept, a director can arrive with a treatment and a crew and simply move through the sets without a single styling decision left to make on the day.
From £20 per hour. Monday to Sunday, 9am to 5pm, with Wednesday and Thursday evenings until 8pm.
Best suited to: retro pop, doo-wop, rockabilly, Americana and any 1950s-concept video. Anything that needs several distinct looks in one location. Mid-week evening shoots.
The Orchid Room sits inside an antiques arcade on Northdown Road, built around an Edwardian bar draped in fairy lights, surrounded by antique mirrors, original art and Victorian furniture, under a ceiling of cascading lanterns, with deep magenta walls and candlelit tables throughout. It is theatrical and slightly otherworldly, and there is a hand-painted crescent moon backdrop on one wall that has clearly been waiting its whole life to appear in a music video. A director either wants this room badly or not at all, and the ones who want it tend to find it photographs exactly as it looks in person.
Exclusive hire gives you the whole place, with no other customers wandering through the back of a shot. The lighting is largely its own, candlelight and lanterns, so the interior reads consistently regardless of the hour and external light management barely matters. Level street access keeps load-in painless.
From £20 per hour. Tuesday and Wednesday, 10am to 5pm.
Best suited to: baroque and chamber pop, folk, ethereal or witchy concepts, theatrical dark pop, and singer-songwriter work that wants atmosphere rather than a clean backdrop.
Some locations give you one good look and ask you to make it work. Margate Delight gives you around twenty, stacked across four floors of a 1970s townhouse next to Dreamland, and the only real difficulty is deciding where to start. Every room is styled with a level of commitment that borders on the obsessive, and changes completely from one floor to the next.
There is a living room with a green velvet sofa, a record collection and art deco wallpaper. A bedroom papered floor to ceiling in poodles. A kitchen in dalmatian wallpaper with an exposed brick fireplace. A bathroom built around a roll top bath, stained glass and a frankly unsettling quantity of religious decor. Five bedrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen and a private garden in total, plus a self-contained loft that can be hired alongside. For a narrative video that needs to move between distinct rooms without losing a day to travel, it is the obvious choice. One thing to note, this location runs on an enquiry form rather than instant checkout, so send your date and a short note on the concept and you will hear back within 24 hours. Still no fees.
From £65 per hour, by enquiry.
Best suited to: narrative and story-led videos needing multiple rooms, indie and pop, retro and vintage concepts, and larger productions that want several looks in one building.
If your concept needs colour and a lot of it, this is the room you have been looking for. Bombina House is a maximalist two-bed Victorian flat a short walk from the seafront, and it is arguably one of the boldest interiors on the Kent coast. Every room is layered with art, textiles and homeware from independent makers, so each part of the flat gives you a completely different backdrop and no two corners look the same. One booking stretches across several genuinely distinct setups.
The standout looks include an orange living room with a black and white checkerboard rug, a sculptural chair and a neon Margate sign, a pink bedroom built around a painted blue arch headboard, and a Victorian staircase painted electric blue and coral under exposed pendant bulbs. The practical side is unusually crew-friendly for a residential space. High ceilings throughout, a large bay window that floods the front room with morning and evening light, and around twelve power sockets for lights and kit, which is more than most flats will give you. With the windows shut it stays quiet, so it holds up for performance video where you want clean playback and minimal street noise. Like Margate Delight, it runs on an enquiry form rather than instant checkout, with availability and payment confirmed within 24 hours.
From £85 per hour, two-hour minimum, by enquiry.
Best suited to: pop, hyperpop, indie pop, bedroom pop and R&B, and any colour-led or playful concept that wants a vivid, saturated backdrop rather than a moody or neutral one.
Fitness and urban videos have a specific backdrop problem. Chain gyms are generic by design, and a studio dressed to look like a gym usually looks like a studio dressed to look like a gym. What you actually want is a real gym, with real equipment, that you have entirely to yourself. O.C. Dean’s in Old Town Margate is Thanet’s only private 1-2-1 studio, with a power rack, leg press, punch bag, kettlebells and step platforms, and crucially a custom graffiti wall covering one side that gives you a distinctive backdrop instead of the anonymous chain-gym look that turns up in half the videos in the genre.
No other members during your booking, no waiting for equipment, no stranger’s reflection sliding into the back of a shot at the worst possible moment.
From £45 per hour. Sunday, 9am to 5pm, with additional availability by arrangement via hello@creatorspots.co.uk.
Best suited to: hip-hop, grime, drill, UK rap, R&B and urban pop. Anything built around training, physicality or a boxing context.
If Margate Delight is maximalism turned up to eleven, the Victorian Villa is the calm one, and for a lot of videos that is exactly the point. It is a spacious period villa with a mix of original character and clean contemporary rooms, plus a large private garden. The living room does most of the work, with blue velvet, a cast iron fireplace, a chandelier, original cornicing and bay windows on two sides that flood the room with natural light, which makes it a straightforward choice for performance, ballad and acoustic work.
The kitchen is the modern counterpoint, dark units and a stone island, and the mature garden gives you an established green backdrop with proper trees, an open lawn and, if the concept calls for it, a swing. There is wifi and, usefully for a crew arriving by car, parking on site.
From £50 per hour. Monday to Friday, 8am to 1pm. Instant booking.
Best suited to: acoustic, soul, ballads and singer-songwriter work, classic or timeless aesthetics, and any daytime natural-light performance that wants a real room rather than a set.
A few practical things, in roughly the order they will matter to you.
Budget context. UK music video costs vary enormously. An independent shoot with a small professional crew typically runs from around £1,500 to £5,000 for a day. Mid-range work with multiple locations and proper post-production sits somewhere between £5,000 and £20,000. Major label releases start north of that and keep climbing. Location fees are one of the larger lines in any of those budgets, and the hourly model here, from £20 an hour, fits inside an independent production in a way a traditional agency day rate rarely does.
Getting here. Margate is about 90 minutes from London St Pancras on the high-speed Southeastern service. Most of these venues are a short walk from the station, so combining two or three in a day is realistic without a transport headache.
Permits. Private venue hire through Creator Spots does not need a filming permit. If your shoot spills out to public spots, the seafront, the Harbour Arm, the beach or a public road, that is a different matter and worth checking in advance.
For anything on public land alongside your venue hire, Kent Film Office is the right place to start on permissions.
Sound. Worth saying plainly, because the advice for music videos is different from any other shoot. The track is almost always played back on set and the camera captures vision only, so ambient street noise rarely affects you the way it would on a dialogue shoot. The exception is if you are capturing any live or behind-the-scenes audio, in which case the basement bar at The Albion Rooms, being below ground, is the most naturally controlled room of the six
The efficient move is to pair venues that sit close together. The Orchid Room and Le Keux are both on Northdown Road, five minutes apart, which makes them a natural double for a concept that wants both a theatrical interior and a run of styled sets. The Albion Rooms works well as a standalone, since the bar, basement and music room give enough variety to fill a day without moving the crew. Margate Delight does the same trick inside one building if your video is room-to-room narrative. The Victorian Villa suits a car-based crew shooting in its morning window.
Everything is booked directly through Creator Spots, no intermediary and no agency fee. Five of the seven book instantly, you pick your slot and pay at checkout. Margate Delight and Bombina House are the two enquiry-form exceptions, both confirmed within 24 hours. Bombina House sits a short walk from the seafront, so it is central and easy to pair with the Albion Rooms or a seafront exterior. If you want to see exactly how booking works before you lock a date, it is all laid out on the site, and for a full-day music video shoot it is worth sending an enquiry to hello@creatorspots.co.uk so the timings can be arranged properly.
The number of well-known videos shot in Margate is long enough that a director turning up for the first time is, in a quiet way, following a fairly well-worn path. What has actually changed is the booking. The gothic bar, the retro studio, the theatrical tea room, the townhouse, the colour-drenched flat, the villa and the gym are now hireable by the hour through one platform, with prices you can see and no fee taken from the production budget.
Most of the work of a location shoot is the scouting, and for Margate that part is now done for you. Seven distinctive spaces, prices you can see up front, and a 90-minute train from London. Find the one that fits your concept and book it by the hour, or for the Albion Rooms and the enquiry-only spaces, send a message and you will hear back within 24 hours. Browse all Margate venues, get your location locked, and go and make the video. The moon backdrop has waited long enough.