Ramsgate royal sands development.

After the previous posts and associated comments one thing that keeps coming up in the comments from various people is why do I feel qualified to question the various experts involved in the development.

The gist being that it is better to leave matters in the hands of the architect, council and developer, rather than listen to the views of a shop assistant.

First I would like to thank all of those that commented and to stress that I expect lively comment, don’t expect everyone to agree with me and most particularly find arguments opposing my views helpful when preparing information to discuss with the contractor, developer's agent and the council.

There are many aspects of the plans and the documents relating to the new development that have called me to question the competence of the architect, council and developer and I shall use detail from the various planning stages of one small area of the building from the plans on the council’s website to illustrate this.

The area I am going to concentrate on here is the western end of the new development adjacent to the cliff, roughly next to where the lift is now.

This is from the first set of plans that were passed by the council (Drawing PL 13-106 Side elevation West 4.11.2003) I pointed out with several other people that the development if built to these plans would tower over the cliff top, in some places by as much as 3 metres.

The architects produced a set of plans trying to resolve this issue, I pointed out to them that that the sections were 1.5 metres taller than the elevations. By that I mean that the building if built to those plans would have the Tardis like quality of being taller on the inside than it was on the outside.

They then produced this set of plans (Drawing PL 13-106 Side elevation West 18.01.2005) as you see they have lowered the ceiling height to resolve this issue and unfortunately the lorry in the picture was too high. So in the detail above you can see that the lorry is embedded in the concrete ceiling.

I pointed this out to them and they resolved this by producing another set of plans detail from them above (Drawing PL 13-106 Side elevation West 22.09.2005) this was an easy one for them to solve they did so by making the lorry shorter.

It was a novel solution so I conceded this one, frankly I had no real idea of what to say to them.

Then when they they were working on the cliff façade repairs they exposed the bottom of part of the cliff and I found the foundations didn’t come down as far as the proposed level of road where the lorry was standing.

In fact some of the cliff had no foundations at all, I put this to the chap in charge of the cliff repairs and got rather a curt reply saying that the foundations were 2 metres thick concrete resting on solid chalk.

At this point I hopped over the fence down there with a camera and a stick and sent him a series of photographs showing that there were indeed no foundations and sent them to him.

Then this year another set of plans appeared (these are the current plans the ones they now intend to build to) they have resolved the problem of the cliff façade not coming down to the level of the new development by raising the road to cover up the absence of any foundations for the cliff face.

As you can see not even the shorter lorry can fit under the building so the road for the lorries and cars has been moved to between the cliff and the back of the development.

The only problem here is as this is the main access it has to be a two way road, however as you can see it is only just wide enough for one lorry.

Now I come to old problem of the height of the building.

First the building space available.

The measurements here are given as above datum (the height above sea level on the plans) the lowest part of the cliff top behind the building is 21.7 metres high.

The lowest the base line of the building can be has appeared on the plans in various different ways and probably at various different heights.

I have taken the minimum you can safely get away with from the flood risk assessment for the new Turner Contemporary because it is the most recent proper flood risk assessment done in Thanet that I can find.

My conclusions from this are you would need to build above and well behind a sea defence least 7 meters high. This leaves 14.7 meters between the floor level at the bottom of the building and the cliff top behind the building.

Now the height of the building.

There doesn’t seem to be any actual regulation height for ceilings in new buildings that I can find, so I took the minimum that the government requires for hostels for the homeless, this is 7 feet and added on a foot for luxury giving 8 feet or about 2.5 metres in new money, which is what I will work in as the other measurements are metric.

There are four residential floors, you need about 3 metres per floor to have 2.5 metre ceilings the thickness of the floor and a gap to put all the wires and pipes into.

Now the ground floor the ceilings here are will certainly have to be more than 8 feet, for one thing shops and other commercial enterprises down there are going to have a lot more in the way of pipes and wires.

I have been wandering around looking at ceilings in shops and the various ducts and thing that one would need above them I don’t really see it would be possible to get away with less than 5 metres including the concrete ceiling and the floor above.

This all adds up to 17 metres, which seems to leave 2.3 that don’t quite fit.

Hopefully someone will spot a mistake that I have made here because if not when it is built and you stand by the top of the cliff by the lift and look towards Broadstairs I think it quite likely that you won’t be able to see over the top of it.