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A crumbling art deco apartment block designed to resemble the Queen Mary is one of the glories of England's south coast. Iain Sinclair is seduced by its faded charms

Just before 7am on the morning of 20 July 2010, a number of passengers disembark from a beached concrete liner and shuffle through the shallows of St Leonards-on-Sea, to foregather and huddle, as with all nautical disasters, while they wait for the lifeboat. Which arrives in the form of a world-weary charabanc. They are head-counted, eased into tight slots for the bumpy ride down the coast to Newhaven. Where they will clamber aboard the MV Balmoral for a day's voyage to Tower Bridge, by way of Beachy Head.

As they put out into a glassy sea, familiar topographical markers are set aside. A steward, staggering to balance a tray of liquid refreshment and burger refills for the captain, tells an inquirer that Canvey Island is Tilbury. Every time we steer in close enough to inspect a natural wonder – the white cliffs of Dover or the Dungeness nuclear power station – our vessel tilts, alarmingly, as 650 cameras whirr and click. Seen from the shore, it must seem a miracle that we stay afloat. The crowded deck is like an out-take from Otto Preminger's Exodus. Quayside at Newhaven, embarkation feels like evolution going into reverse, primitive life forms rushing back to the ocean. Standing room only, queues for the breakfast bar snaking up the stairs and twice round the deck. The recklessly abandoned St Leonards boat-building, on the other hand, its design based on the Queen Mary, has plenty of room for a decayed first class of freeholders, with an ever-shifting ballast of rentals in steerage, tucked away in the old servants' quarters at the rear.

Marine Court looks big enough to rehouse Hackney. Superstructure burdened with a forest of radio masts and photovoltaic scanners, this prewar monster looms over the remnants of James Burton's 1820s colonnades, at a slight angle, like a stack of dirty plates from a wedding breakfast in the Royal Victoria hotel. You can picture the unstable reef tilting in the wind, which surges around shops embedded in its hull with enough force to repel retirees at the window of the showroom where they stock an infinite variety of furniture to die in. Marine Court, which should never have been given a berth, stealing light from steep hillside terraces, has the dignity of an old circus elephant. With the passage of time, it has become a geological feature. And one of the glories of the south coast.

The only other such building in the world, a luxury hotel based on the Queen Mary's competitor in the blue-ribbon Atlantic trade, the SS Normandie, is to be found in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Fringed by trees, proud against a permanently blue sky, the sleek curves of the hotel and the dazzling whiteness of its balconies demonstrate everything Marine Court is not; but what, with care (and serious investment), it could become. The Normandie hotel, in streamline moderne style, was conceived by the engineer Félix Benítez as a loving tribute to his French wife, Moineau, whom he met, in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers fashion, on an ocean voyage. The rival concrete liners were launched at the same moment, 1938. The Normandie hotel accrued the glamour of a Cuban resort for high-rollers out of The Godfather, while Marine Court, undone by war, boarded by pirates, declined into a set for The Shining. A haunted hangar in which to house a crazed writer, hammering out the same sentence, over and over, while he waits to join the undead in a decommissioned cocktail bar.

A good scattering of Marine Courters were aboard the Balmoral that morning. I had never seen so many in one place. On winter stays in the building, I encountered no other human presence: antique grille-fronted lifts groaned, furred pipes complained. Hot water resisted every inch of the way to chromium-plated bathrooms. Endless corridors, viewed through diamond-shaped portholes, were low-lit and unpeopled – at least by anything you could see or touch. Monitor screens in the mirrored lobby, with its chequerboard floor, played back drifts of aquarium light. Panels were as blank as if wiped by a vampire. An occasional porter, left over from another era, creaked through, with a nod and a tug at the cuffs of a threadbare uniform.

I was frozen in my tracks by the approach of a figure in black T-shirt and baggy tracksuit bottoms, up there on the monitor screen: a memory-spectre, from an erased chapter of my life, come back from the aether. I hadn't set eyes on Ranald Graham since our student days in Dublin, 40 years before. His flat, at the top of the building, was insulated in unshelved countercultural paperbacks and olive-green copies of Paris-published Burroughs. Along with mounds of plays and film scripts, made and unmade. There had been an afterlife, so he explained, of television production, The Sweeney, Dempsey and Makepeace, strategically funded programmers in Hong Kong. There were adventures in Hollywood too, including the screenplay for William Castle's last film, Shanks, made in 1974 and generally acknowledged as the weirdest project ever to emerge from a major studio. The white-face mime Marcel Marceau plays a dual role, as a scientist trying to reanimate dead animals and a puppeteer assisting with the experiments. The puppeteer releases zombies to jerk and twitch on missions of vengeance. After that, there was nowhere to go. Except Marine Court. The ship of fools where lost souls are always welcome.

Ranald was gregarious, a lovely teller of tales. He took an active part in the gambling school, predicting football scores, at £2 a hit, in the minimart on the corner. And he nursed the ambition to complete the ultimate horror script, the one he had been cooking for so many years. He was hammering at his laptop when he heard a rap at the window. A figure, naked to the waist, punctured by needles like a refugee from Hellraiser, stared in at him. And beckoned. He roared, he rushed. The barefoot man lurched away into the darkness. He was the living proof of my conviction that this building incubates narrative. Stories tell us, not us them, while we listen to the drag of pebbles on the tide, and become absorbed in the great fact of the English Channel. But there was a rational explanation for the spook at his window. A poor creature, suffering and medicated, in another flat on another floor, had become disorientated, and was roaming the balconies trying to find a safe door.

The accidental fraternity of Marine Court, gathering on the deck of the Balmoral, like Aleister Crowley's coven up on the ridge in Hastings, were drawn together. We were there for a reason. We had the powerful atavistic urge to view our concrete liner from the sea, to achieve a reverse angle that would confer on the peeling leviathan the gravitas it deserved. Distance, in this case, was time. From seven miles out, as we stared at the hazy coastline from alongside the Royal Sovereign lighthouse, Marine Court shone with the brilliance of its launch as a modernist fantasy, a pleasure palace conceived in the spirit of Agatha Christie. With art deco restaurants, tea rooms, Turkish baths and "fittings worthy of a West End mansion".

Kevin, who rented a flat in the building and who loved everything about it, introduced himself. He carried digital equipment with which to assemble, as he confessed, a feature-length account of our voyage. His camera privileged Marine Court in a way denied to the human eye. It became what it had ceased to be in the real world, a paradigm of south-coast regeneration; a 600ft, 13-storey wonder. Kevin explained that he tended to stay indoors, on his balcony, after work. He was a big man and too many of the street folk of London Road knew him from his day job as a security guard at Morrisons. One enterprising local had been captured with 12 bottles of Baileys secreted inside his overcoat.

Experiencing a temporary estrangement from Hackney, I walked around the coast, in the opposite direction to the Balmoral, to search for a place that would fire my imagination. After Whitstable, Margate, Deal, Dover, Pevensey Bay, Eastbourne and Brighton, I gave it up. Until the photographer Effie Paleologou invited me down to Hastings for a talk she was giving about a commission, to depict the town at night. Like Ranald Graham, she stumbled into a landscape of astonishing eccentrics, whispering voices hungry for the right ventriloquist. The beauty of the thing was that she absorbed all this, without patronage or exploitation, and produced a series of exquisitely graded minimalist prints, with not a breath of human interference. A leakage of sour neon against dying natural light. She led our group on a walk through the flower-dressed alleys of the Old Town. Characterful houses were still to be had at modest prices. This quarter, and some of its denizens, twinned with the Hampstead of the 1960s. St Leonards, a mile or so to the west, and a much more comfortable fit, was Hackney-on-Sea. Asylum seekers and economic migrants, in melancholy limbo, sat on the pebbles or hitched themselves to the rail, while they waited for bad news. I saw, with a sense of awful inevitability, a photograph of Marine Court.

A cursory viewing was enough, the way that you could lie in bed with nothing but sea and sky outside the window, through that CinemaScope frame of rusting rails. It was going to be tough to live up to the challenge of the wraparound view, angular balconies and curved decks. The promenade running away to the funland arcades, the fishermen's huts like extended sentry boxes. With a roar of Nietzschean overdrive, the concrete superliner of Marine Court was topped out and ready for the champagne bottle in 1938, two years after work had begun. The promotional brochure was a silver-stamped work of art. It referred to our building as a "Hymn to the Sun".

As with the trip on the Balmoral, the brochure speaks of anchoring a mile from shore, to appreciate how the dominant features of the bay were now the Norman castle and Marine Court. Properties left over from the original (and decaying) Burton estate were acquired by an astute estate agent, Commander Bray. The borough engineer Sidney Little had the vision of a concrete city, a marine metropolis, stretching from Hastings to Bexhill, with the boat-building of architects Kenneth Dalgleish and Roger Pullen as the flagship. The promenade made a chain of visual connections between underpasses, shelters, sunken gardens and the spectacular Olympic-size lido at Bulverhythe. Sensuous railway posters celebrated this English Riviera, its bathing beauties and lotus eaters basking in sun lounges below Marine Court. Within a year, the dream was over. The developer had been carried away, as were so many others, by the concept of a beached cruise liner: the suspension of time and dissolution of space. Residential take-up was disappointing. The developers folded with debts of £333,000 (at a period when a pleasant three-bed semi in the town could be had for £750).

War was declared. Marine Court was requisitioned, to be occupied by airmen and cypher clerks. A German fighter-bomber, seeing it as a legitimate target, blew away three floors at the prow. Sidney Little's underground car parks now looked like an anticipation of bunker architecture. The rest of the story is showroom, casino, Witch Doctor disco, unexplained fires, drug rehabilitation unit. Subterranean space was rented to a Nigerian pastor-solicitor, Michael Adelasoye, who was later found guilty of involvement in helping to arrange 383 sham marriages. Adelasoye operated in partnership with a Ukrainian man extradited from Sweden for drug offences and a local vicar with a large church and a very small congregation.

At first, there were regular refits and paint jobs; by the time of the new millennium, Marine Court was crumbling away. Managing agents declared themselves bankrupt. Services collapsed. One lady, driven to the point of breakdown, turned on her taps and left them running, until all the water in the building's system was drained. A brave and determined group decided to apply for enfranchisement, to take over the freehold. After a protracted series of court battles, they succeeded.

The old Marine Court magic, despite all evidence to the contrary, is happening again: an onboard democracy based on unreasoning love. Street-level shops are active once more and catering to incomers. The building is no elegant Bauhaus translation, but a steampunk generator of nautical fantasies. I smiled when the man in the curry house, under the canopy, told me that Lord Longford was a regular and that the Walker Brothers were always dropping in. Then he produced the album. And here they are, with poppadoms and Cobra lager, snapped by the ship's photographer. Late immortals comfortably settled in a corner for the cruise that never ends.

English Heritage is running an exhibition, with guided walks, on the history of Marine Court at the Burton Gallery, Marine Court, St Leonards-on-Sea from 10-12 September. theburtongallery.co.uk

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With the opening of the Taj Cape Town, will the city prove the broken windows theory of urban decay?

The broken windows theory of urban decay first appeared in the magazine The Atlantic in 1982. Social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling proposed that little problems, such as broken windows, can soon become big ones – squatting, vandalism and violent crime.

It's been a seductive idea ever since: that fixing windows, picking up litter and scrubbing graffiti are snowflakes that can trigger an avalanche of regeneration, returning middle classes and Starbucks all round.

In South Africa's great cities, the fight is on. Johannesburg has developments in unfashionable areas, such as the boutique shops of 44 Stanley Avenue and the creative hub Arts on Main. I recently witnessed the opening of 12 Decades, the city's first "art hotel" in a renovated building deep in the urban underbelly. Each room takes a decade of Johannesburg's history as its theme; one has apartheid legislation printed in the toilet bowl.

A decade ago Cape Town city centre was seen by many as a no-go area: daylight muggings, boarded-up buildings and parking attendants on the make. More than a few windows have been repaired since then, and last weekend there was more evidence of renaissance: the opening of a five-star hotel.

The Taj Cape Town is a sister of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, recently reopened after the 2008 terrorist attacks. It brings Indian decor and "refined Indian hospitality", and a spin-off of London's Bombay Brasserie, to a once unfriendly corner of the Mother City.

As in the US, city centres tend to be more dynamic, beautifully ugly and historically evocative than the safe but bland suburbs. The 177-room Taj Cape Town has plenty of ghosts, as it occupies the former premises of the South African Reserve Bank (1932) and Temple Chambers (1896), combined with a newly constructed tower.

Adapting old buildings is one short cut to character. Much of the original banking hall is intact, with its carved clock, sash windows and grand chandelier. Up high are the two balconies where minstrels entertained customers as they queued to make their deposits or withdrawals.

In the roof is a curved skylight made with scientific precision: in 1929 the architect James Morris bullied the astronomer royal into measuring the position of shadows month by month so he could maximise the amount of direct sunlight in the hall.

This was a gilded age, after all, up to a point. There are four columns that were originally meant to be made of marble imported from Sweden, but after a court case and an outcry from taxpayers, the architect settled for cheaper Portuguese Styros marble in cream and brown.

I was among American, Australian, European and Indian journalists invited to the hotel's grand opening last weekend. We had been promised an appearance by Jacob Zuma, who had been over the road at St George's Cathedral, but the president was a no-show, possibly fearful that cutting ribbons at luxury hotels would jar with striking nurses and teachers.

From a marquee, we walked up a red carpet, through the old bank's giant bronze gates and local Paarl granite facade. The crowd of faces was mainly white or Indian with a small black minority. There was a speech from Ratan Tata, the Indian tycoon whose Tata Group owns the Taj hotels, about India's affinity with South Africa and references to Gandhi and Mandela.

I stood with American and Indian journalists, musing on the significance of this Indian initiative. "There's a sense in the US that our best days are behind us," said the American. "The 20th century was the American century, but now we're in the Asian century with China and India. It looks fairly inevitable."

Among the guests was Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, which has led the renewal campaign. He took us on a guided tour of the immediate neighbourhood, one of the most historically rich in South Africa.

People have been living in this region for at least 70,000 years – it's one of the oldest areas of human settlement on the planet. At least two millennia ago, the Khoisan and Khoikhoi people would bring their livestock to what they called Camissa (place of sweet water).

The sun rose and the sun set and nothing changed, making it easy to pretend they were alone in the universe. Then one day the aliens came.

The Dutch East India Company set up a refreshment station and began taxing the indigenious people. And so centuries of conflict over water and land began here.

The company set up a lodge where it is believed that up to 9,000 slaves, convicts and mentally ill people were held between 1679 and 1811. The building later became the Cultural History Museum, which in apartheid terms meant white cultural history. Black culture was put in the Natural History Museum.

Just a few minutes' walk away is a public artwork that commemorates the day in 1989 when police fired a water cannon with purple dye at pro-democracy protesters so they could identify and arrest them. One demonstrator leapt on to the vehicle and seized the cannon, turning it on to the police and National Party headquarters. Later a piece of graffiti declared: "The purple shall govern."

Parliament, the 350-year-old Company's Garden, the National Gallery, the South African Museum and numerous other sites are all within walking distance. I ambled around St George's, where Desmond Tutu once rallied the faithful against apartheid, and thought myself back in England amid the carved pews, stained glass and stone effigies.

The memorials on the wall speak of brief lives: "Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth. In memory of Adriaan Carl Johannes Bouwer, aged 16, Sunday school teacher, whose life of good promise was cut short by a fatal fall on Table Mountain, September 27th 1883, on the eve of the cathedral confirmation, September 29th. Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not, Psalm 17:5."

Another reads: "In memory of Montague Treby Molesworth, lieutenant in the Royal Navy, who died on board HMS Cleopatra March 25th 1844, of spear wounds received on the 23rd in an unforeseen and general attack made by the natives of the west coast of Madagascar on the unarmed crew of the Pinnace under his command while actively engaged in weighing the anchor of their ship ...

"In this barbrous outrage, the work of two minutes, and result of a defeated attempt at theft, seven out of 13 brave men lost their lives with their gallant officer. Thus was his bright career arrested ere 24 summers had dawned upon him, yet in that brief space, he had proved himself by his prowess and presence of mind in the moment of danger all a British sailor should be."

The Taj Cape Town hotel is on Wale Street, Cape Town, South Africa.

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