If ever there was a town that has lost its reason to be, it's Folkestone. The pelting rain that greeted me was a potent reminder of why British tourism fled to the Med as soon as it could. The train on which I arrived afforded glimpses of the Eurostar tracks that killed the Boulogne ferries. Folkestone was once a grand seaside resort and thriving harbour with lucrative fishing and mining. The mining has disappeared, the fishing limps damply along, harvesting barely enough to supply the town's whelk stalls.

What can save it? Here, over the horizon, comes Art. The Folkestone Triennial is the latest manifestation of the cash being poured into the town by former Saga chairman Roger de Haan and his cultural regeneration outfit, the Creative Foundation, and curator Andrea Schlieker. So many councils have rhapsodised over regeneration, culture, place-making, cultural identity, that you can begin to feel slightly nauseous when you hear about art as the saviour of another desolate town. Especially placemaking. But Folkestone, in spite of its commercial decline, has much to start with. There are the luscious, emptied grand hotels, The Metropole and The Grand - English architecture at its exuberant Edwardian zenith; the picturesque high street; the strange beauty of the grassy Leas, an attenuated lawn that follows the coastline. Folkestone presents an ordered, imperial version of an England that appeared briefly in the first years of the twentieth century and was quickly blown to pieces by the First World War.