Friday 4 February 2011

Margate Birchington and Westgate, Victorian Maps and Directories

New local history website http://margatelocalhistory.co.uk/ the picture above, click on it to enlarge, is an example of what’s available there.

If like me you are a bit bleary after spending half the night looking at the detailed maps of Thanet on the Kent View website http://extranet7.kent.gov.uk/kentview that I mentioned in yesterdays post, then you won’t get much done today.

The maps on http://margatelocalhistory.co.uk/ are much sharper scans, some of them are earlier, all I can say is enjoy.


This new website will have a lot more added and will need keeping an eye on.
The other thing that is available on this site are various Victorian directories of Margate, a word of warning here, street numbering in Thanet didn’t stabilise until about 1900.

What I mean here is that if you find a house listed with a street number it isn’t necessarily the same number as it is today.

To save you from venerating the wrong building you really need to compare what you think you know with a 1900ish directory, I publish the Margate one for 1900, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/margate_in_the_early_1900s_some_pictures_and_a_street_directory_for_1900.htm
Now an apology, this was one of the first local books that I published and the original image files of the pages were lost in a computer accident, so I can’t publish them online.

3 comments:

  1. Interesting times.... you could build a new railway station right next door to your competitor and despite never using the building they won! Margate's original line was eventually replaced by Arlington and the disused new station went onto establish the Dreamland site, which at the time was mostly a swamp!

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  2. Interesting as to where the high water mark is and the mumber of groynes.

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  3. I will spend a lot of time on the site

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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.