Thursday 11 April 2013

A quick sketch from Deal Pier a few photos of Deal in The County of Kent, possibly a day off ramble if I get time.


My day off today but we didn’t get out until after lunch when we went to Deal to buy some books, the café on the end of Deal Pier is relatively new, about four years I think and although I have used the old one in the past, this was my first visit to the new one.

Pot of tea and a very large chunk of shortbread was about £3.50 I think, all good quality and a useful place to sketch when it is too cold outside.

The sketch is done with a grade B 0.5mm propelling pencil any sketching errors erased with a propelling rubber, a very useful item for sketching out and about as the rubber part doesn’t get dirty in the pocket. With so many buildings now painted magnolia, it is useful to have Naples Yellow in your palette.

Here are the photos from my phone https://plus.google.com/photos/103118335852639233427/albums/5865653757559748817?banner=pwa


Deal is a town that seems to have weathered the problems of modern town centres better than most. There seem to be more independent shops than most small towns in the area.

There are only a few empty shops and still a larger proportion of independent shops selling real products than most town centres.

I guess with it being so close to Thanet, there is a sense the Thanet town centres could have survived better in the way that Deal has. 

5 comments:

  1. Deal is a long way from any big out of town superstores as far as I'm aware, so that probably makes a big difference.

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    Replies
    1. Frankly Peter it’s an appalling reflection on our society that the proximity of large supermarkets and out of town shopping centres destroy our towns.

      You feel there ought to be a way that we can have both

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    2. Well one way is to bring the large supermarkets TO the towns, but when that happens you get a minority doing their best to delay / stop things (ie Tesco at Arlington)... so instead people shop at Westwood Cross!

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    3. Deal of course has several large supermarkets, and not only are they near the train station - they're actually in the station car park! Proof that this is the best way forward.

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    4. Peter we had a largish Tesco in Ramsgate, with an associated multi-storey car park, it was responsible for the closure of a lot independents, the Manston Tesco was built on the understanding that they kept the Ramsgate Tesco open, but of course they closed it causing further damage to the town.

      I think part of the problem is that some of the supermarkets play a sort of cat and mouse game with towns.

      I guess I don’t really know what the solution is, but do my best to do as much of my shopping as I can in Ramsgate.

      Delete

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.