Thursday 14 May 2015

Watercolour Painting of Sandwich Guildhall from Le Bistro above No Name Shop, the anniversary of the closure of Manston Airport and the council’s plans to review the cpo decision

This pen and watercolour painting of Sandwich Guildhall is one I pained over a rather relaxed French lunch in Le Bistro http://www.nonameshop.co.uk/bistro/

The whole business eating, doing the pen sketch, putting the paint on took about two hours, while contemplating how old which bit of the building was.



The answer is the blue bit is 1597 the red bit 1912 and the green bit 1973, a tricky one for the architectural enthusiast.

Sorry I should have taken a better photo of the building than this one showing the watercolour as well.

It’s a bit like the situation in Canterbury where the medieval buildings obscure the view of the cathedral from The High Street that I used to enjoy in the 1970s, time travel is a peculiar thing.

On to Manston airport, which closed a year ago today, well the council are to decide on reviewing the situation a week today, here is the link to the agenda item http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/documents/s46404/ManstonAirportextraordinaryreport21may2015.html?CT=2


My hope is that the council will decide to put the issue forward for public consultation, so that the new council has a proper mandate from the Thanet electorate for the Manston issues.   

4 comments:

  1. Michael

    I guess the recent European Court ruling that the UK Government must improve air quality, and maintain it where it is already good, may have far reaching implications:

    http://www.aef.org.uk/2015/05/05/why-last-weeks-court-ruling-on-air-pollution-could-stop-airport-expansion/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Echo my take is that with the air quality in Thanet approaching the level where life expectancy is significantly reduced due to the prevailing wind direction meaning we mostly get the air that has travelled across the length of southern England. When you factor in the implications of a freight hub which would be mostly 747 type aircraft which burn a ton of kero per movement (landing or takeoff) with the pollution dissipation reverting to background about 10 to 12 miles upwind, the levels in Broadstairs and Margate are likely to go over the significant life expectancy reduction level frequently. I would think that the residents there should be consulted on this aspect of an airfreight hub before any move is made towards the cpo.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am surprised that the first items on the agenda are not to elected the chairperson and then the leader. otherwise how do they get elected?
    It also needs checking that the new councillors are aware of they are obliged to declare any emplyoment/commercial interests they and their families had at Manston which will then prohibit them from speaking and voting.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dave there are two council meetings scheduled for Thursday, the first one the annual council meeting to select the leader, cabinet and committee members, the second following straight on from the first an extraordinary meeting to explore revisiting the cpo.

    I don’t think that the matter of commercial interest could come up until an indemnity partner has been selected, something that would be very difficult if the indemnity partner were RiverOak as an aspect of a Delaware LLC is that company shareholders names are kept secret.

    Frankly if one were to accuse a councillor of being a RiverOak investor and therefore a beneficiary were they to be the indemnity partner in a cpo, I don’t the there is any reasonable way that that councillor could prove they weren’t.

    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.