Pleasurama Thanet District Council, Ramsgate shopping and other stuff.

I really shouldn’t be writing blogs at all at the moment I am far too busy with my bookshop, the bookshop world has changed and the effects are coming my way in terms of extra work, more of that later on in the post if I get the time.

So starting with the council cabinet meeting about Pleasurama, my take here is that all the political side of Pleasurama counts for very little and ultimately it is the physical problems related to the site.

One of these is the cliff and I have added some pictures and newspaper articles which will expand so the are big enough to read if you click on them and then click again once expanded.

Anyway here are the videos of the part of the council cabinet meeting that discussed Pleasurama.  

Part 2

Well the meeting certainly shows that the councillors are interested in confronting the councillors of other political parties, but i am less certain they are interested in what the people they represent actually want.

Obviously this site has to be dealt with in some way and it does seem likely that however it goes it will be some sort of privately financed development there. In terms of local developers Cardy Construction are one of the best, so if there is going to be a developer involved then we are very unlikely to better than them.

I have had a bit of a look at the various things on the internet about the cabinet meeting and so far the impression I get is that there was supposed to be a big save Manston airport demonstration outside but only about 100 demonstrators turned up.

I am yet to be convinced that there is strong local support for the TDC cpo it does seem that less than 50 TDC council taxpayers turned up, I am still convinced that TDC shouldn’t be going down the cpo path without first holding some sort of public consultation to find out what it is that the people who finance TDC through their taxes actually want.

This is a bit like the Pleasurama problem inasmuch as no one has convinced me that either the RiverOak plans for an airfreight hub or the Discovery Park plans for a fairly high proportion of industrial use are actually viable due to the physical limitations of the site.

Personally I am not that good on political ramifications, but when someone says they want to engage in developing something that doesn’t make sense, like building igloos on the beach, then I do look for an ulterior motive.

In Victorian times seaside towns had piers so that people could get on and off of paddle steamers. Here in Ramsgate there was a – well still is in a derelict – sort of way a paddle steamer quay ant the end of the harbour wall, so we didn’t need a pier. 

This didn’t stop a company being set up and a pier actually being built, followed by it and several other companies that got involved going bankrupt, I publish a book about this see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id122.htm  

Back to the books, I bought a reasonably large collection of industrial archeology books last Thursday, loosely described as my day off, interesting because most of had been bought secondhand during the last thirty years and most of it still has the prices penciled in the front.

Now in the days before the internet, which is when the book collector put this collection together, you could only really do this by a mixture of travelling from bookshop to bookshop buying books on this subject and getting specialist catalogues from booksellers that specialised in books on history, engineering and crafts.

There wasn’t very much money in all of this but everyone seemed to enjoy it and the prices of the books settled around making sure that the booksellers involved didn’t go bankrupt.

By this I mean that a books the size of an ordinary hardback novel about say the industrial archaeology of East Anglia would first come out new at a price around £25 at today’s values. The print run would have been pretty short and I would doubt the author or the publisher made a large amount of money.

When it turned up in a general secondhand bookshop it was probably priced at around half price, about £12, but in practice this type of book was mostly sold on to a specialist bookseller. Usually for a price somewhere in the £8 to £10 ball park who then put it in his catalogue and sold it for around £15 to £25. Mostly depending on whether it was out of print or not.

Now the internet means that all of this has gone and for the most part you could buy a great many industrial archaeology books at less that £3 with very few costing more than £10 each including postage, so I have spent all day rubbing out prices from ten fifteen or twenty years ago and writing in mostly much lower ones.

I still have a great deal more of this to do so there isn’t much time for blogging at the moment. 

I will add to this post as I get the time.