Saturday 4 April 2009

New shops opening in Ramsgate.

Although a few large shops have closed recently in the centre of Ramsgate, most notably Woolworth, where my bookshop is on the edge of the town centre quite a few new shops have been opening, the latest two being a cycle shop and a washing machine and domestic appliance shop.

The large shop next door to me, that was vacated by the chemist that moved to the Montefiore medical centre when it opened about two years ago and has been empty since is being fitted out as a general store.

The recession is a peculiar thing as it tends to work in favour of some of the shops, particularly when they are cheaper than the out of town shops.

Although King Street in Ramsgate is fairly scruffy and has quite a few closed shops it also has a good share of cheaper than the out of town shops, butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger, my bookshop, several secondhand furniture shops and Iceland.

Whatever it is that’s causing this I don’t really know I have been trying to puzzle it out, I wouldn’t have thought with all of the empty shops around that this would be the most desirable available place to start a new business.

Whatever it is that is happening it seems to be bucking the general trend anyone else got any ideas about this?

3 comments:

  1. It's a shame that no new stores (apart from restaurants & art shops) seem to be opening in Margate, instead we're losing more & more shops that sell essentials such as groceries & clothes. I was dismayed to read in the local press that Margate's one remaining greengrocer's is probably closing soon: just a few shorts years ago we had three greengrocers + another one in westbrook, but all the others have either closed or stopped selling fruit & veg.

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  2. Peter the only solution I can see is to boycott out of town shopping and encourage others to do likewise. Frankly though I am amazed to see shops opening with Westwood Cross and the present economic climate I think it may be that the shops in this part of Ramsgate have had their rents reduced considerably, several businesses have moved to different building in the same street because the rent was lower.

    Whatever is causing it if one could find out what it is perhaps it could be applied to Margate.

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  3. Unfortunately these out of town centres are very popular (particularly) with younger people: an example of this is a current campaign on FaceBook to get Primark to open a store in Westwood Cross, despite the fact that if (or when?) they leave Margate it would be another enourmous blow to the town.

    Myself, I almost always do my weekly shopping in Birchington (my favourite place to do shopping in Thanet), Westgate or Margate, but occasionally I have to go to Westwood Cross for things that I can no longer get in the towns (such as reasonably priced but good quality blank DVDs, something I previously bought in Woolworths).

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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.