Tuesday 2 December 2008

Northdown House and Ramsgate maritime Museum.

Of TDCs asset disposal program the two assets that I have found people to be most interested in are Northdown House and Ramsgate Maritime Museum.

TDC know that a lot of people in Ramsgate wish to retain the Maritime Museum and frankly we only seem to have lost it because the trustees forgot to renew the lease.

With Northdown house however probably a similar amount of people wishing to keep it as a public venue and according to the press release below the council actually listend to them..

With Northdown house the council are implying that that they have capitulated due to popular demand so why not the Maritime Museum too, perhaps I am being cynical here, but could it be that they are only extending the consultation period and even considering transferring it to the community itself (whatever that means) because they can’t get round the legal covenants that say it must be used for the benefit of the local community.

2 comments:

  1. Has anyone - especialy TDC Councillors - read the Quirk Review "Making Assets Work"? It seems that TDC officers are using this as justification for recommending disposal of buildings, like Northdown House and the Maritime Museum, to commercial tenants or developers.

    My reading of the Review suggests the oposite is the intention of its authors and the government.

    It wants Local Authority owned buildings to be given to community based organisations (Like EKMT once was?)to free them up to provide services and amenities without the nonsense of Local Govt. bureaucracy. Quirk uses examples such as a village hall: "reclaimed from the local authority" after finding that it was given to the village by a 19th century philanthropist. Northdown House seems an obvious, and more recent, fit!

    Can we have a review of how TDC has reviewed the review?

    ReplyDelete
  2. They have had no policy for Northdown house - since when do you try to sell something without checking the legal title to it first?
    They have fluffed from department to department - planning has been dealing with it and the head telling people that there are no covenants. Just indicative of the whole of TDC i'm afraid - jump first for a headline - "we're reducing your council tax by flogging your assets" never mind the ascetics the people of Thanet are too stupid to want to have a grade 2 listed building as part of their heritage. That argument followed through with the museums - they dont care about history either they aren't educated enough to bother about it!

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.