Thursday 2 September 2010

Some thoughts about Kent Terrace and other pictures

I have just returned from a pleasant day out and sat down in the living room with the rest of my family we have one guest staying, a board game is in progress, one of us is playing guitar and I have just put the camera card into my laptop to see what the pictures on it are like.

The board game is Go For Broke, the object being to lose all your money, my two youngest children are having some difficulty coming to terms with a game where the object of the game is to lose, something that is mildly amusing.

The first page of pictures to publish is at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop910a/id3.htm the first picture is of the new development at the bottom of Kent Terrace, I assumed that anything going between the Regency houses there and the Belgian Café building would be in keeping with the buildings on either side.

The building that has the Belgian Café and Pete’s Fish Factory on the ground floor is in the style of a castle, built I think in about 1820, I assume it originally housed The Castle Inn as an engraving of 1817 shows a different building there of that name.

Looking vaguely at the picture I realised that the levels of the windows of the new building don’t line up with the rest of the terrace, a look at the council’s planning website reveals what is going to be built there.
OK it isn’t particularly unpleasant looking, just total out of keeping with the style of the buildings around it, the obvious question here is, why not fill in the gap with another bow fronted Regency style building like the other ones?
This sort of thing depresses me and it frankly doesn’t make any sense, oh well there wouldn’t be time in life to examine every planning application and object to all the daft ones, perhaps one day we will have government sympathetic to the town, until then there is only a limited amount one can do.
There is some activity on the Pleasurama cliff façade, thanks to Gerald for this picture and letting me know about this one, I am not sure what is going on there as by the time I managed to get out and take some pictures the chaps with the cherry picker were having a break. Next time I got out they had gone, it is obvious that they didn’t weed it like last year, my take is that anyone looking at the condition of this thing before building work starts can only be beneficial.

Another squirrel, this time on Plains of Waterloo.

Blocked drain adjacent to the harbour, by the bus stop, after the recent flooding both in Harbour Parade and York Street, it seems incredible that this drain that has been blocked for about a year, still hasn’t been dealt with.

Once again numbers one and three slipways are occupied, there are plans to build a development on numbers two and three slipways, there is a mock up picture of what this development will look like in the town council’s offices, but nothing I can find on the TDC planning website. I have to explain here that the TDC planning website is a very strange website indeed, if you were going to design a website deliberately to conceal information it would make a pretty good starting point. So it may be there and I just haven’t been able to find it.

Anyway back to this development, what no one can tell me is how the harbour is supposed to operate with only one slipway.
On to Westgate and Birchington where a nice old Norton single was parked up, it looks to be about 1955, as around 1956 alternators started to replace dynamos I think it is an ES2, the external oil filter is a modification.


We went for lunch at Quex Barn today, I opted for the £10 two course option in the pictures.
The next page of pictures at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop910a/id4.htm were taken in the gardens at The Powell Cotton Museum in Quex Park.

5 comments:

  1. Unusual for English Heritage, their current view with new development is that it doesn't try to pretend that it is something that it isn't. So this will probably be a bit out of keeping, and ovbious that it isn't pretending to Georgian

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  2. how did the monstrousity opposite the Foy Boat obtain planning? this being a conservation area!!!

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  3. English Heritage take a case-by-case view and sometimes prefer an obvious contrast in design. However, they often prefer and support high quality, accurate reproductions using original materials -particularly when filling gaps. The Kent Terrace design is therefore puzzling.

    The 'monstrosity' in Liverpool Lawn is qually mysterious and was built to very low standards, which the new owners have attempted to rectify. Perhaps this glaring mistake is why EH are very firm supporters of the prposed developement of new 'Regency'houses opposite that site.

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  4. It's odd that TDC seem to often tell property owners that their 'Traditional-looking' plans are unadventurous and what is needed is a 'A Steel & Glass' landmark structure to juxtapose against the local streetscene; look at the 'Telephone Box' in London Road and then examine the similar advice that was allegedly given to the owner of 30 London Road which he apparently went along with and then had
    'destroyed' by local opinion and was forced to withdraw... As for the slipways, serial operators have failed to make a significant success of the slipways and for the most part they are an eyesore. Rather one extremely busy slipway than an ugly series of sheds and a fragmented business employing casual labour. Any new developments in Ramsgate will create badly needed jobs and with the Fast Train service slowly gaining some serious support I think we need to create a more modern, positive environment to lure new people to the town with their disposable income...

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  5. hmm,what you think about plans for quex barn to sell off some green land next to them for static caravans?

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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.