Wednesday 4 March 2009

Pleasurama myth mystery some answers and more delay.

The contractor now says work won’t start until after the summer so as to avoid conflict with people using the beach etc, but they will be preparing the site for work during the summer so it won’t be safe for it to be used for temporary leisure activities.

Some sources suggest that this may be more to do with getting the money from the financier behind it, either way it seems most unfortunate that we can’t have temporary leisure use of the site for the summer.

The really big question though is, does it need have a new planning application submitted?

This is really down to planning law and what constitutes material change, the criteria being “would an ordinary person notice the difference between the original planned building and the modified planned building” in Pleasurama’s case I believe that there have now been so many changes that they would.

The plans originally submitted were for a building with a gull winged roof with no road behind it, it was designed to look like an ocean-going liner, the main problem was that it was too tall to fit in the space between the high tide line and the top of the cliff.

The new plans are for a flat roofed building (removing the gull wings removes any architectural merit it could have been said to have) with a road behind it.

The roof was a bit of a myth the lines on the roof plan apparently show the small slope to the centre to allow for drainage.

Of course the most important problem is still that in any sort of emergency the people inside will be trapped between the face of the cliff and the sea. The emergency escapes that the environment agency has asked for are not included in the new plans, nor has the flood risk assessment that they asked for been carried out.

So one again another long delay it’s now been over 5 years since the first lot of plans were passed, we are now on the third contractor, the third set of plans that are significantly different. Although there have been a great many more than 3 sets of plans, the others were for those three-dimensional objects that can only be drawn in two but never made in three dimensions “ impossible objects” – bit like life really.

I have published some then and nows from the plans for those of you that cant face the intricacies of the TDC planning site click here to view.

8 comments:

  1. No wonder Blackpool business people visit Thanet to see how not to do it.

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  2. When will it be finished?

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  3. how will they stop people getting on the roof and falling off ?

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  4. Well Don I think it goes a bit like this, firstly the roof is rubber so if you manage to get there bouncing will be the thing, however most aspire to a fairly happy end, perhaps the mixture of seagull droppings and stuff people have thrown onto it from the cliff will in all probability make the go elsewhere

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  5. Let them fall off. If they're that stupid we don't want them contributing to the gene pool

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  6. It seems that TDC Planning is being circumspect when it states that because some minor work in the environs but not on the 'approved building' has begun within 5 year expiry point, the plans as approved have been started. Is this position really tenable? Time to tell developers to submit a new application seems appropriate.

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  7. Yes Bertie plus the work in the environs was flawed so shouldn't count anyway ?

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  8. If I never started a job within five years it had to be reapplied for so whats the difference the building is so far removed from the original I would say if it never had to re apply it would be a criminal case

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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.