Tuesday 8 February 2011

Pleasurama, Royal Sands Development, Progress.

It does seem that the Pleasurama development is underway now and I continue to keep an eye on it with mixed feelings.

I think the most peculiar aspect of the whole thing is the lack of public information about it, particularly considering both the prominence of the site and size of the development.

I do periodically tackle the council about this, promises are made that we will have some drop in sessions where members of the public can get information about what it will be like. The last one we had was before all of the changes to the building and building materials, most especially the materials that will be used for the acre of roof adjacent to a the footpath in front of Wellington Crescent.

My ongoing questions about cliff safety and flood protection still for the most part remain unanswered, so I don’t really know if we are going to get a dangerous white elephant or a beneficial development.

With the cliff façade there is also the public money issue that Thanet District Council have spent about £1,000,000 on a repair that has to a lesser or greater extent been unsatisfactory and they don’t appear to have made any effort to recoup part of the money.

Ironically in terms of spectators, the view of the site from the cliff top means that it is easier to watch the construction work than at any other site I know of.

The only document we have describing the development is the planning and deign statement for the taller zinc gull winged roofed building envisaged in 2003.

Over the last few year I have concentrated on the safety implications of the development, now it is commencing and there is nothing much I can do about these anymore, I have questions about practical aspects of the building design.

Raising the ground level adjacent to the cliff because the cliff façade didn’t extend down far enough caused one factor that looks total impractical. This is the narrow two way access road between the back of the building and the face of the cliff, it isn’t wide enough for lorries to pass and there is nowhere other than on the road that they can stop to unload.


Here are the inevitable photographs from my wander about today http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/2111/id3.htm

2 comments:

  1. Still no comments? I will make one.
    Plenty of builders there in the summer then to wolf whistle the bikini clad babes on the beach.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is the only site where I can read about the development and I check here regularly. I am concerned about the safety aspects and expenditure and wonder why there is not more public interest in gaining satisfactory answers to the points raised.

    ReplyDelete

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.