Wednesday 3 August 2016

The date of the Ramsgate Pictures I published yesterday

I linked yesterdays photos to some of the local Facebook groups and that was where the comment and attempts to work out the dates came from.


The last date it could be is fairly easy as the pavilion hasn’t been built, it was built in 1903. Apparently it took six weeks to build the Pavilion, the official opening was in 1904. The pictures were obviously taken in the summer, so the summer of 1903 is the last possible date they could be.


I publish a guide to Ramsgate for 1904, which is one of the most useful books for dating pictures of Ramsgate around this period, I have used some of the pictures from the 1904 guide to illustrate this post.


Obviously if you live in Ramsgate and it isn’t Thursday or Sunday when my bookshop is closed then you can come into the bookshop and have good look at this guide, if you live some distance away you can click on this link to buy it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate___broadstairs_by_camera___pen_1904_1905.htm


I would say that going for a walk around Ramsgate with the 1904 guide and the 1900 street directory http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate_in_the_early_1900_s_some_pictures___a_street_directory_for_1900.htm is one of the best ways to improve your understanding of Ramsgate’s history.


If you have limited funds then just the £3.99 directory will do the job as it tells you what all the buildings in Ramsgate were in 1900.


Back to the answers, so what’s the earliest date the pictures could be? This relates to the highest building in Ramsgate, the tower on the top of The Granville. I publish two books about The Granville




and


detail from one of yesterdays photos

I think that some people have been having underbrowse, anyway the tower of the Granville was once much taller than it is now it was used to hold the water tanks that powered the spa in the hotel there. When the spa opened in 1871 it offered 25 different types of bath.

picture from between 1870 and 1899

My own take is that it was just too tall and heavy so they reduced the height in 1899 so any picture showing the tower tall is between 1870 and 1899 and any picture showing it shorter has to be after 1899.


Going up the tower even at its reduced height is interesting, so here are some links to the pictures I took of going up the tower.





  
So there you have it either 1899 1900 1901 1902 or 1903
 



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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.