Broadstairs Tree Massacre and other stuff in the news

Some of you have probably seen the tree massacre posts on the Thanet Press Release Blog and wondered what this is all about see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/demo-to-be-held-against-tree-massacre.html and http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/go-ahead-given-for-tree-massacre.html

Obviously I don’t live in Broadstairs so I don’t think the council are obliged to tell me what’s going on there, so I tried looking at the council’s planning website http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet this is a very bizarre website so I can’t link to the various applications on it, the way to get to the applications is to click on the letter P in the street name part of the page and then click on PIERREMONT AVENUE the are 5 park applications dated in 2005 described as current and 2 2008 ones described as decided.

I don’t make these things up, they presumably emanate from some sort of Parkinson’s Law in a world gone mad.

I tried very hard to work out from the various documents there what trees they intend to massacre, unfortunately the definition of the document detailing this was to low for me to tell.

What I can’t tell also, is if this is development that Broadstairs people want or not.

The local blogs and today’s Your Thanet are a bit thin on local news at the moment, or perhaps it’s just my interpretation.

I tried asking the council’s press department about what’s going on with the Royal Sands Pleasurama Development, but they kept saying they would tell me tomorrow, which never came, so I have finally and in desperation put in an official request to the council, something that will be time consuming for them.

The trouble is with this sort of request is they have to answer them in ten council days, this translates into a fortnight in real time, needless to say they wait until the last day to respond in the spirit of open government. This means that you have to ask all your questions at once, instead of engaging in some sort of dialogue. Here is what I asked, I hope I didn’t leave anything out:


"Please treat this as an official customer feedback request.

This is essentially a general enquiry about the Royal Sands Development on the old Pleasurama site in Ramsgate.

1 Please send me any addition information about this development that I haven’t requested below, because I am unaware of its existence.

It would appear that some work has occurred on the site during the last month, but obviously this work doesn’t relate to the development agreement schedules and conditions of the various leases contained in it.

2 Does this mean that the leases are now invalid and the development agreement is to be determined?

3 Or does it mean that there has been an updated agreement with new schedules?

If the development is going ahead, either to a new schedule or is being allowed under some other flexible arrangement:

4 Can you please supply me with a revised building schedule?

5 Can you please tell me which of the approved plans the development is to be built to and if these plans are published on the council’s planning website?

6 Can you please send me details of the public information sessions that were promised once work started on the site?

7 Can you please send me any updated information on the cliff safety issue? Details and dates of the promised cliff top weight limit, correspondence between the council, the HSE, the developer, cliff survey and maintenance schedule, any cliff survey reports, any agreements for cliff maintenance between the council and the developer.

8 Can you please send me details of any flood, storm or emergency escapes incorporated in the development as a result of the EA recommendations 8th Feb 2008.

9 If the artists impressions, details of roof material and other building materials for the building to be built, are different to those described on the councils planning website, due to the various different plans and in consequence plans being used that no longer relate to the ancillary details, can you please send me the details of these changes?

10 If the plans that are to be used no longer relate to all of the planning and design statement, can you please send me revisions to the planning and design statement?
Please confirm your receipt of this request?

Best regards Michael"

Another thing I have been trying to find out about is what has happened about The Restaurant at the End of the Pier, this went up for tender some time ago and I asked if anyone had taken it.

It is the sort of thing people in Ramsgate want to know about, but the council just telling me, well that seems to easy, it certainly seems pretty crazy to have to turn a question like that into a series of cast iron requests.

Pleasurama Royal Sands Cliff, a conspiracy or a conundrum and other Sunday Rambles.

A long old ramble about Pleasurama first
The cliff behind the Pleasurama site in Ramsgate has become something of a local joke to those of us living in Ramsgate, we all saw the extensive and expensive works to repair it, about £1m of TDC money was expended on these.

After that we all saw the weeds growing out from the cracks between the new paintwork, the weedings the repairs to the repairs, the bits dropping off and at the moment we can all see the rather dodgy looking bits where parts of the bottom of the cliff has been exposed.

Having made various fusses about Pleasurama for years now extending back before this blog see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tdc/report.htm or even as far back as seven years, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/seafront/ and more on this blog see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/search/label/Pleasurama%20development

With the cliff safety issues relating to the Pleasurama site I genuinely thought that I had made my point and that the council, The HSE and the developer had taken what I have been saying seriously and had some sort of “make safe the way of the cliff” plan.

Then Simon Moores reacted rather oddly to one of my comments, with a comment on his blog.

“So please no more conspiracy theories of this kind on my weblog if you will and the same with the cliff. You are starting to sound like Rick banging on forever with allegations that the IRA had some loose connection to Thanet councillors” see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/itson-weblog-so-it-must-be-true.html

That was last Sunday and I thought I ought to check the situation i.e. to make sure that my concerns are being addressed properly. There are all sorts of concerns related to this cliff, most of which are open to doubt and my banging on about them will eventually either show me up to be a bit of a nut, or there will be a cliff collapse there and, what, I will be able to say, I told you so, or something.

One concern that I thought every one agreed with me about, is that there needs to be a weight limit for service vehicles driving along the cliff top footpath, next to the edge of the cliff.

I am not naming names here, I am not Rick and certainly not invulnerable to libel, even if what I am saying is the truth, nor do I want to put people in the awkward position of having their name googled as an exact phrase and coming up associated to something like this, maybe years later, when they are applying for a job or something.

Anyway the senior engineer at the civil engineering consultants that the council use, agrees with me and the council’s own civil engineer agrees with me, that driving heavy vehicles along the edge of the cliff is a bad idea.

If you are an engineer there isn’t much else you can do, you see although the concrete cliff wall looks impressively strong, to people who are not engineers, it doesn’t actually do anything to hold up the cliff and wasn’t designed to do so.

What you are looking at, although you can’t really see this, is an unsupported chalk cliff and I don’t suppose you would drive your car too close to the edge of one of these, were it just grass and chalk.

In fact chalk cliffs from an engineering point of view are generally much stronger than they look and a lot of Thanet roads go within about 2 metres of the edge without much in the way of worries.

It’s the last few feet next the edge that’s best avoided, for something very heavy as I am sure most people can work out for themselves.

The added problems with this particular bit of cliff relate to different things that have happened to it over the years, tunnelling, navel guns mounted there during the world wars, long periods of bad surface maintenance, that sort of thing.

Anyway after Simon’s comment I wondered just how seriously the health and safety people had taken my concerns, so I wrote to them and it seems that the council may have been a little economical with the truth when talking to the HSE about the cliff.

There are several documents that I have relating to the cliff, they were obtained via the freedom of information act, they may seem a bit dull but click on the links if you want to read them.

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/id3.htm

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/id4.htm

are the ones that the I think the council may have forgotten to send the HSE and

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/id2.htm

the one they definitely did send the HSE.

I don’t really know what is with the council and Pleasurama, the EA sent them a letter three years ago, saying that they should insist on some basic safety modifications to the deign see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ea/

The senior council officer, who is to be the new chief executive of the council, advised the cabinet to terminate the development agreement and they ignored her, I don’t think I should publish confidential internal council documents, but do have the documentary evidence supporting this if pushed.

Then all this business about the cliff safety, I don’t think that anyone reading the developer’s contractor’s report http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/ about the condition of the façade could reasonably disagree with my contention that some sort of further investigation should be made.

Then the business of the recently issued 199 year lease, I haven’t enquired about this one, but do wonder in the light of the Hartsdown application and all the delays over the Maritime Museum lease, why the Pleasurama one didn’t go to consultation, or perhaps it went to a secret public consultation like the leadership one.

I know people probably think that I bang on about this consultation that I consider to have been rigged, but if you are one of them you may ponder for a moment, why it hasn’t appeared on the council’s consultations page, see http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council__democracy/consultation.aspx perhaps they are in a state of denial about this, see no evil who knows.

The trouble is that if I make a complaint about this again, they may think I am being vexatious, as it is they haven’t yet answered the feedback I made about this consultation when it was on.

Anyway back to the dodgy cliff and Pleasurama, the bit that worries me the most is the bit where the drain has blocked at the top of the cliff, this caused a puddle on the footpath, this froze and thawed causing the surface of the footpath to come away, this caused water to get behind the cliff façade, this caused bits of the façade to drop off.

The council say that some of this is wrong I think, I a not quite sure which bits they think are wrong, the last link in this chain of events was when the council put up a barrier at the bottom of the cliff and I thanked the only to get a reply from them, saying that the barrier wasn’t to protect people from being hit by the lumps of cliff that had been falling off.

Obviously there is work going on down on the Pleasurama site at the moment and having joined the church of responsible blogging, I emailed the council’s press department saying that I was going to do a post about Pleasurama, they emailed back saying that there was going to be a meeting about this at the end of last week. So I emailed them back saying I would delay the post until then. I made it very clear that a lot of people including myself would like to know what is going on after all this time.

The current development agreement says that the metal cage that forms the structure of the building should have appeared by now, so with the development agreement having been thrown out the window again, what is going on is anybody’s guess.

As yet I haven’t heard from the council, so this is a sort of partial post.

A look at some of the other Thanet blogs over the last week.

I will start with the one that I publish but don’t write http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ this is where I publish press releases that people send me and new council documents, frankly it isn’t a very popular blog, only about a third of the number of people that read this one, read it. Quite a lot of blogs don’t even have links to it, including Bignews Margate that links to the other main Thanet blogs.

Pageviews today 147 Pageviews yesterday 180 Pageviews last month 5,431 is what the stats say for this blog but two recent posts there have been getting some comment.

One has the emotive title GO-AHEAD GIVEN FOR TREE MASSACRE see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/go-ahead-given-for-tree-massacre.html I have to admit to being a bit unclear about this one and have been reading the comments with interest.

The other is http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/employees-and-contractors-from-pfizer.html?showComment=1297692530692#c3615986546683633728 about the Pfizer closure.

Starting at the top of my sidebar today Thanet Life http://birchington.blogspot.com/ the latest post http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/no-right-turn.html has video of a pilot’s eye view of the approach to the Runway at Manston over Ramsgate.

As Simon points out there really isn’t an alternative to overflying Ramsgate when landing and taking off in this direction.

Manston expansion is one of those strange Thanet mysteries that seem a bit odd given the economic climate, the latest episode being the Parkway railway station, despite government being Conservative all the way up and a promised reign of common sense it would seem that despite the desperate need for money to sort some of Thanet’s problems, the only big lump of future government money seems to be for this station.

If comment is anything to go by Simon’s post last Sunday http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/when-whistle-blows.html was very popular and is about the Margate Football Club plans at Hartsdown Park.

Next Ken Read’s blog http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/ with an informative post on the development of Ramsgate Harbour http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/2011/02/wind-in-our-sails.html

Next to one of the local news pros Isle of Thanet Gazette's Saul Leese who started his own YouTube channel yesterday, see http://www.youtube.com/user/mindbloggles this is called Mind Boggles.

I tuned in, waited for mind to boggle, and, yes, it boggled.

Publishing 6 vids to YouTube since yesterday suggests that Saul may have gone critical.

I have just returned after taking the children to Morelli's in Broadstairs for an ice cream and notice that Simon has put up a very encouraging post about the undercliff in Westgate, it really does sound like some sort of cooperation between residents and the council, see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-society-at-its-best.html

I also notice that Simon is getting the same problem when you try to expand some of his pictures by clicking on them if you are using Internet Explorer, you get a virus warning instead of a bigger picture.

I think someone must have reported Blogger to Microsoft as being a malicious website. A bit like those spam emails saying you have a malicious file in your computer, they give you instructions to delete it, the only problem being that the file you delete is vital to the running of your computer.

Tony Bignews Margate had a post with a lot of comment on it last week, see http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/2011/02/boring-biased-and-conservative-bbc-in.html even quick comments from Cllr Chris Wells. `What is it you want to ask, Tony? Reminded me of an oft parodied or plagiarised thing in literature that I am not sure of its origins, you know the one where the computer asks the questions.

I will endeavour to ramble on as the day progresses.

1 Granville Marina Ramsgate 2nd floor goes in and a day off ramble

After taking the children to school today I noticed considerable activity on Marina Esplanade, this was due to another floor going into the Marina Restaurant project.

There are a few pros and cons to this project, on the positive side there has been a flood risk assessment and this has caused the ground floor level to be raised up by about a metre than the Pleasurama development ground floor level.

This should make the building reasonably protected from a combination of high tides and storms, the negative side to this is that there is no emergency escape for the people inside to the cliff road above, so if there is a big storm they remain inside the building until the storm is over.

Also on the positive side the quality of the building work seems to be of a high standard, I have been keeping an eye on this one and haven’t seen any nasties going on there, no covered up shoddy workmanship, building waste dumped in building voids and so on.

My main concern relates to the part of the building that wasn’t there before and the cliff behind it, this is a large concrete covered lump of chalk, as far as I can tell, the top of which is in a bad state.

Here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id9.htm published using my small netbook so I didn’t get a chance to look at them before publication.

Another reservation I have is the heavy lorries using the Marina Road viaduct, I am not sure it is really up to taking the weight, the signs at the top saying NO CONSTRUCTION TRAFFIC are all very well, but there really isn’t another way of accessing the site, because of the way the Pleasurama site hoardings make the promenade too narrow.

I will add to this post as the day continues and if I get a WiFi connection also add some more pictures, uploading a hundred or so pictures via a mobile phone connection isn’t really viable.

You can also see the work on the Pleasurama site from above, the concrete pads could conceivably be for a tower crane, I have asked the contractor to tell us what they are up to and am hopeful that I will get a reply.

Herne Bay today, interesting if you live in Ramsgate or Margate as like Deal it's a very close about 14 miles town centre to town centre.

Taking photographs as I do the first thing one notices is the absence of dog's mess on the promenade, this can be a major problem when looking at the world through a viewfinder.

Here’s the first batch of Deal pictures, published in the café while eating my lunch http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id10.htm

Another thing I noticed was the parking, the first 2 hours on the seafront was free and when I moved the to a car park nearer to a shop I had bought a lot of heavy books from, the parking charge was £1.10 for all day.

Not as many pictures after lunch as I would have liked, due to the amount of books I had bought, combined with the problem of getting back to collect the children from school.

Café brunch, very fast service and good value at £4.99, right in the middle of the town centre, green blinds, I think it was called Greenfields, good WiFi connection too, I was in a hurry and published the previous lot of pictures while eating.


Anyway here are the rest of the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id11.htm

I don’t know exactly where the problem lies here in Thanet, the truth is that both Ramsgate and Margate both had town centres at least as good as Herne Bay’s or Deal’s, when I first opened the bookshop in Ramsgate 23 years ago, and not all of the shops that have closed in Ramsgate Margate have any competition in Westwood Cross.

Something I notice particularly is the independent antique and junk shops that have mostly closed in Ramsgate still seem to be thriving in Herne Bay have mostly gone in Thanet.

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

Ramsgate Today; a few pictures, thoughts on Pleasurama and a few other things

Bitterly cold here first thing this morning, I am afraid I capitulated on the health and environment front taking the children to school by car instead of walking, so the picture above is taken with a Mickey Mouse camera.

After years of prevarication and the recent two men working on the site, something that looked like another delay, it realy does look as though work is really starting on the Pleasurama site in Ramsgate.

For good or ill something is happening there at last, nothing much I can do about it so I intend to make the best of it.

Later at lunch time I got out with the camera and took some pictures, here is the link to them http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/111/id3.htm thoughts about them below, starting with the top of the page of pictures and working down.

A chap from London has bought the old Carpet Sale Centre shop opposite us, as far as I can tell he paid about £160,000 for the whole caboodle and thought he had got a real bargain until he spent a few days here clearing the rubbish out. I think his contingency plan if he can’t sell it on, will be to split it into three shops and rent them out for about £100 per week each. Although what anyone could make a go of selling in this part of Ramsgate now is a tricky one.

Roadworks in Harbour Street, a new gas main I think, have produce two adjacent signs that are a bit only in Thanet.

It is good to see two of the slipways in use, so my thanks to the leaseholder who is evidently permitting their continued use.

Something is happening with the Pleasurama cliff face, the bit that the council spent £1m of our money on painting and filling, lots of holes have been drilled and red circles that may be felling markers have appeared.

I gather the council are not involved in this work and haven’t funded it with our money.

I will ramble on if I get a chance, got to shut the bookshop now.

Work Starts on the Royal Sands Development Ramsgate at the Pleasurama site again.

After the work to clear the site of piles of dirt and rubbish that stopped at the beginning of October the same week as a lump of masonry fell off of the cliff façade, leaving a small mountain of dirt, work has started again.

This time it is to investigate the pipes and electrical wires on the site prior to piling, obviously this is necessary as they wouldn’t want bore a pile through the main sewer or an electrical cable.

Apparently the plan is to start pile boring in December, this isn’t official information but just comes from asking the chaps working on the site what they are up to.

Speculation about this project is a difficult one, perhaps a crystal ball would be more appropriate than asking the council.

Sunday Ramble Royal Sands Development Ramsgate Pleasurama and so on

I will endeavour to add to this a the day goes on in the normal manner, that is between children F1 bits of shopping and even a walk if the weather clears up for a bit.

I didn’t post last week, for a number of reasons, top of the list was that most of what I did manage to write was fairly depressing, spending cuts, failings of the council and so on.

Pleasurama one again and it’s just the Royal Sands of embarrassment as far as I can see, a sort of emperors new clothes situation that can only happen where government is involved.

I have to discuss this thing with councillors and council officers where it is as though if they comply with all their rules and regulations this will hold back the sea and hold up the cliff.
The flood risk situation is best expressed by the development next to it being built on a metre high plinth, this is to keep the high tide out of the building, something that won’t be a problem for the Pleasurama development with its floor a metre lower, the sea is to be held back by a planning regulation.

The business with the cliff is equally absurd, after several weeks of my concerns that a lose bit of the cliff will fall on someone and kill them the council have finally put fencing at the bottom of the cliff stopping people from going where the lumps of cement have been falling.

Apparently this isn’t because there is any danger to the public, my email to them below in blue.

Unfortunately despite the work carried out on the cliff façade by TDC on 8th October (removing vegetation lose masonry from the portal blockwork on site and from the area either side of the site boundary at the eastern end of the site) more of the render has come away from the façade, I think over the last couple of days.

One again this is over the site boundary, so any of it that falls to the ground will do so from about 50 feet and probably land partly on the site and partly on the public highway.
There is a ledge immediately below the part I can see that has come away which may prevent part or all of it from falling to the ground, I would think this would depend on how far up the delamination extends.

As you know my concern is that the rapid deterioration of this part of the façade is due to the blocked drainage and damaged surface above it and my main concern is that water has entered this part of the cliff making its stability uncertain.

I am also concerned that both the council and the council’s advising engineers Jacobs have a considerable vested interest in the cliff façade within the site boundary being shown to be in good condition. I am further concerned that any survey of the cliff by ***** or the councils engineers after the main contract to repair and coat the façade would be influenced by the liability were the cliff to found defective.

I am also uncertain as to the situation relating to work on the site, by this I mean that all work on the site seems to have stopped since the weekend 2nd 3rd October when the piece of render fell off.

Is it your contention that it is safe to work on the site at the moment?
I have attached a picture with the loose part outlined in red, the render seems to be about 50 mm away from the brickwork behind, because the surface of the render hasn’t cracked this suggests that the delamination extends some considerable way up.
I am asking that you take the following action.

1 Cordon off and sign the effected area until the problem is investigated.
2 Institute a weight limit topside.
3 Investigate the localised area and remove the lose render.
4 Arrange for a full and independent survey of the cliff behind the site extending beyond the site to Augusta Stairs.
5 Please register this as official customer feedback.
Best regards Michael

Their reply below in red.

Dear Mr Child
Customer Feedback Reference:22375/1533347
Thank you for your recent communication which was received on 2nd November.
The section of render to which you refer was noted as being delaminated during
the inspection on 8th October, it is not a new defect and due to its size and
location was not considered to pose an immediate Health and Safety risk.

The inspection undertaken on the 8th October did not suggest any more serious
issues were present however the Council intends to carry out a further
inspection of the wall to test the bond strength of the render over the whole of
the rendered surface. To ensure that the whole surface is tested thoroughly it
will be more appropriate to use a scaffold to provide access. Any further loose
areas will be identified and removed through this work and repairs can then be
carried out to all such areas as necessary.

The area of unmade ground immediately below the cliff has been fenced to allow
these works to be carried out. I would like to thank you for your interest in
this issue. Whilst I cannot agree with your hypothesis on the cause of the
delaminated render your concern and reporting of the issue is appreciated.
We hope that this resolves the matter to your satisfaction.

If you are not happy with our response, you may write to us with your reasons
within the next ten working days, requesting a further review.
In order for us to respond as efficiently as possible, please ensure that you
quote the above reference number and address your communication to ******
- Customer Feedback Co-ordinator, Regeneration Services.

Yours sincerely
******
Building Control and Property Manager

Both pictures were taken today, due to the weather they are a bit gloomy, it’s easier to see what I mean if you click on them to enlarge them.

Anyway at least the whole of this dodgy bit of cliff is cordoned off so that it is difficult for the public to get below it.

Sorry I am not having a very good time with internet publishing at the moment and some of my line spacing isn’t appearing.

How I reply to the council on this one I just don’t know, the cliff is clearly dangerous and the firm of experts that they employ at great expense have said quite clearly that bits of it have foundations where they just don’t.

Some sort of expert opinion of the condition of the cliff before people have to live below it doesn’t seem much to ask.

Much talk about benefits at the moment with housing benefit near the top of the list.

The whole benefit thing was a bit on the odd side from my point of view inasmuch as the various tax allowances for having a family were replaced by various benefits and it took me some time to realise this, at some considerable cost.

I will ramble on about how benefits may have effected shops for a bit, sort of unclarified thoughts.

The housing benefit has rather a peculiar side effect in the part of Ramsgate where I live, I am not saying that it is deliberate just that it is what has happened.

The English were a nation of shopkeepers and King Street in Ramsgate was typical of this, now much of it has been converted into a residential street and it sometimes makes me wonder if we have become a nation of claimants.

While on the subject of shops I notice that the camera shop in Ramsgate is going to close, another victim of interesting times. As far as bookshops are concerned Canterbury Bookshop is closing next month, this is a secondhand and antiquarian shop, the last remaining Albion Bookshop, the secondhand one in Broadstairs seems likely to as well as the owner has recently died.

The problem here is a simple one based upon the value of buildings, and the way shop rents relate to this.

For many years the rent of a shop has been about 10% of the value of the building.

In Ramsgate and Margate a medium sized building on the edge of the town centre was worth about £40,000 or about £30,000 if it was in poor condition, the smaller ones that were a bit on the grotty side £20,000 or less, when I moved here just over 20 years ago.

No one much wanted to live on the edge of the town centres, as it is noisy at night so the flats over the shops didn’t really make much difference to the shop rents.

So a shop that you could live over the top of had a rent between about £40 and £150 per week, more in the town centre where rentals were more related to how busy the site is.

Now along comes grants to do up residential properties and housing benefit, combined with a lot of people who will live where they are told so long as the government pays the rent.

So a medium sized building on the edge of the town centre becomes worth about £200,000 converted into flats producing a rental of about £20,000 per year, all this for a part of the town where no one really wants to live.

There is a problem here too relating to housing benefit which is of course that the shopkeeper living in the whole building probably wouldn’t get it for the part of the building he lives in if his business produces a low income.

Fragmented town centres with relatively high rents during an economic crisis combined with the effect of the internet and out of town shopping on town centre shops, you could say we are in difficult times.

Royal Sands Development Ramsgate Pleasurama Where Now?

I am asking for a bit of help from the people who read this blog, not a for or against just some ideas as once again I am one again going to try to get some temporary summer use for the building site next summer and some sort of resolution to the ongoing problem.

This will be a fairly long post as for the most part I am clarifying my thoughts by writing them down.

With the temporary use I have tried this every year for last few years and once we did get a leisure use for the site throughout the summer.

All of the other years the answer from the council has been that the development is to start imminently and that the developer would need all of the site so any other use would be impossible.

No work has ever started on the site and not a single part of the foundations have been laid.

I suppose the best solution to the overall problem would be if the planning application approval was withdrawn, this would give all of the parties involved a chance to come up with some scheme for the site that is viable.

The problem there is that the road layout and surface drainage pipe, both of which are outside of the site, form part of the approved planning application, because of the work on these the council’s planning department tell me that technically work has started on the development.

Normally if no work had been started then the planning consent would have expired by now but because of this technicality the approval remains valid forever.

Another road to go down would be to say that as the developer is behind schedule in terms of the development agreement between the developer and the council.

This would if it went through all of the various stages exclude the current developer, SFP, but there are problems related to this course of action.

One is that the planning approval would still remain valid. Another is that the developer could engage in litigation against the council to recover the money that they have already spent on the road, surface drain and planning, I think this is the best part of £3m, money the council hasn’t got.

Now my guess is that the current development agreement would be very difficult to apply in this economic climate, mainly because the first part of the development it stipulates that what should be built is the hotel, something that wouldn’t be likely to sell easily at the moment. Another problem is that the hotel is at the western end of the site and all of the construction vehicles would have to pass the hotel until the development is complete.

Since the plans were first approved various issues have come up that makes the development both less viable and less attractive.

The first was the height issue.

The first set of plans were for a building that was too high relative to cliff behind it, in fact height has dogged this development from the early stages.

There is only so much space between the high tide level in front of the building and the cliff behind it.

Various modifications have been made to the plans to try and fit the building into this space, with out changing the basic design so much that the changes invalidated the planning approval.

The net result of this was to remove the gull wing effect of the building depriving it of any architectural merit.

Since the plans were approved the area has been designated a high risk flood zone, this means that the plans would have to satisfy more stringent rules if they were to be approved today.

Another problem is the situation with the cliff behind the development has changed too since the plans were approved.

The council had the cliff surveyed and the survey said that the condition of the cliff wasn’t good.

Since the survey the council has spent various sums of money totalling about £1m on the cliff behind the site and it looks as though cliff maintenance there is going to ongoing, expensive for the council but more significantly will need more space between the cliff and the building, to work on the cliff, than the plans allow for.

Another problem is the road access to the site, the plans and road layout at the moment are reliant on busses being able to use the Victorian viaduct running down the face of the cliff to access the building, for the life of the building.

At best this would mean considerable expense for the council during the life of the building maintaining this structure and at worse the viaduct could become too unsafe for road traffic during the life of the building.

Another problem is the capacity of sewage system in this part of Ramsgate, this is the one that regularly causes flooding in Harbour Parade and would seem unlikely to be able to cope with a large development’s waste.

All in all the council passed plans that at best will be very costly for the council if implemented and at worse will produce a development that is partly or wholly unusable for part of its expected life.

In the long term I think the best solution would be a different development, both higher in terms of the flood risk, further from the cliff to allow better access and designed so that it would work with road access that wasn’t reliant on the viaduct.

At the moment only one of these factors seems to have affected the progress of the development and that is the condition of the cliff behind the development.

So far the council’s stance has been that there is nothing serious wrong with the cliff, as the council owns the cliff and is responsible for maintaining it, this puts the council in a position of considerable financial liability throughout the life of the development.

On the face of it the developer can play this situation to his advantage, using the condition of the cliff as an excuse for not starting the development as he is supposed to have done to conform to the development agreement.

I think this is what happened at the beginning of this year when he examined a small part of the cliff façade.

You may remember that at the end of last year I made a visual examination of the cliff façade and pointed out defects some of which the council repaired.

After this the developer’s contractor investigated some of the defects that the council hadn’t repaired, this was a bit of a strange investigation because it was only of a small part of the potential defects.

They did two things that I could see. One was to investigate some of the other panels like the one the council had to replace, from what I could see this showed that some of the panels that they investigated were faulty (either too thin or not properly constructed). My conclusion here is the it would have been easier and cheaper to replace these panels before the development was built, making access much more difficult and causing disruption to the people living in the development. Something that totally mystifies me though is that finding some defective panels they didn’t investigate the rest of them.

The other thing was to do with the foundations of the support columns. When I made my visual inspection it appeared that the foundations couldn’t have been constructed to the design on the plans of the façade that the council had supplied me with. So either the foundations were different or the simply didn’t exist. What the developer’s contractor did was to dig beside the first of these support columns to see what was underneath it, the result of this was that they found no foundations at all, just muddy earth, there can be no doubt about this I went on site and examined the hole they had dug and photographed it. This leaves me with the question why didn’t they examine the foundations of any more of the support columns?

You have to appreciate that this isn’t a case of some minor construction sitting on no foundations, but a seventy foot high concrete construction, four meters away from where the contractor intends to build an hotel.

Whatever the situation work on the development’s foundations didn’t start at the beginning of this year like it was supposed to.

What did happen this year was that a subcontractor laid the surface water drainage pipe between the site and the harbour.

Finally during September the contractor started to clear the site and I was assured that the development was going to start. This work lasted for about three weeks and involved two men and a digger. This work stopped before the site was completely cleared at about the same time as part of the render fell off of the cliff façade, I am not really certain if the two things were related.

Now having said all of this which is I know a bit negative, the main contractor, Cardy Construction, are a local firm, employing local labour, they also have a good track record.

Now if I push the council to terminate the development agreement, the plans remain valid and we could get a much worse developer.

I will definitely push for temporary use of the site for next year, although I don’t hold out much hope.

I will definitely continue to push for a survey of the cliff, this is a bit of a difficult one as the civil engineering firm that the council normally uses for this sort of work are the same firm that supervised the main cliff repair job and the same firm that assured me in writing that thick concrete foundations resting on solid chalk exist, where there is in fact just muddy soil.

I will defiantly continue to push for a proper flood risk assessment before any building work starts.

Both of these things should be sensible measures that can only save both the council and the developer future problems.

What I am asking for here though is any suggestions of any other actions I could take over this matter.

Pleasurama site cliff façade another loose bit

Below today's email to the council and the HSE, slightly modified to remove names.

“Unfortunately despite the work carried out on the cliff façade by TDC on 8th October (removing vegetation lose masonry from the portal blockwork on site and from the area either side of the site boundary at the eastern end of the site, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/council-weed-pleasurama-cliff-facade.html ) more of the render has come away from the façade, I think over the last couple of days.

One again this is over the site boundary, so any of it that falls to the ground will do so from about 50 feet and probably land partly on the site and partly on the public highway.

There is a ledge immediately below the part I can see that has come away which may prevent part or all of it from falling to the ground, I would think this would depend on how far up the delamination extends.

As you know my concern is that the rapid deterioration of this part of the façade is due to the blocked drainage and damaged surface above it and my main concern is that water has entered this part of the cliff making its stability uncertain.

I am also concerned that both the council and the council’s advising engineers have a considerable vested interest in the cliff façade within the site boundary being shown to be in good condition. I am further concerned that any survey of the cliff by the councils advising engineers or the councils engineers after the main contract to repair and coat the façade would be influenced by the liability were the cliff to found defective.

I am also uncertain as to the situation relating to work on the site, by this I mean that all work on the site seems to have stopped since the weekend 2nd 3rd October when the piece of render fell off.

Is it your contention that it is safe to work on the site at the moment?

Picture above with the loose part outlined in red, clcik on it to enlarge, the render seems to be about 50 mm away from the brickwork behind, because the surface of the render hasn’t cracked this suggests that the delamination extends some considerable way up.

I am asking that you take the following action.

1 Cordon off and sign the effected area until the problem is investigated.

2 Institute a weight limit topside.

3 Investigate the localised area and remove the lose render.

4 Arrange for a full and independent survey of the cliff behind the site extending beyond the site to Augusta Stairs.

5 Please register this as official customer feedback.”

Council weed Pleasurama cliff façade and then say they haven’t

Thanet District Council have been removing some of the weeds from the Pleasurama cliff façade, the bizarre question here though is, why would they say they haven’t?
Weeds on Friday.

No weeds on Sunday.

Sorry about the vertigo, at least no one was on the bike when it went over the edge. This is the bit where the stubborn tree was, obviously they managed to get it out.

You have to admit it looked a bit touch and go, with the spade and the cherry picker.

Strange that they have left some of the weeds behind, some sort of selective gardening I thought at first.

What is really bizarre though is that the council say that none of this work has occurred on the bit of the façade behind the Pleasurama site, I quote, from an internal email so I have dotted a few bits out.


“The email from Michael Child refers to a piece of render (approx 1m2)
which delaminated and fell from a brickwork panel just outside the
fenced Pleasurama site at the East end of the site last week. The area
was inspected from a hydraulic platform last Friday …… and it was found that a short section of lead flashing had
failed which in turn lead to the failure of the piece of render. This
section of cliff facade is outside the construction site and not within
the area which received the refurbishment works in 2008 and 2009. This
was a local failure of sand/cement rendering and was not caused by
water
ingress behind the cliff facing structure itself.

Some repair works will be required following the inspection which will
involve pointing to the brickwork, re-rendering and repairs to the
flashing. These works will take up to two days to complete and will be
funded from the coastal maintenance budget.

As mentioned above this issue relates to a section of cliff facade
outside the Pleasurama development site which has a very different
method of construction to the cliff facing structures within the site.
There are therefore no implications as a result of this incident for
The development works on the site”

Sorry it was a bit chomped up due to TDCIT.

This picture shows the cliff façade between the Ramsgate Cliff lift and old tunnel entrance by Augusta Stairs both marked in red.


The Pleasurama site boundary fence is marked in light blue.


The cliff façade can be split into three parts


Yellow portals I would guess this bit was built between 1940 and 1950


Green arches built I think in the 1930s


Mauve brick built in the 1860s

The dark blue lines show where the weeding that I noticed has occurred.

Now follows a long rant about the façade for anyone who is interested.

The arched, green bit, of this façade that appears to be normally constructed and looks like a normal piece of civil engineering, apart from at the base where there is no sign of the load spreading foundations being where the design drawings show they should be. The chalk at the bottom of this part of the façade doesn’t appear to have been disturbed in the way one would expect to dig out for the spreaders, but this is a regular arched structure showing no signs of movement and is probably fine.

My guess is that that it is founded directly on solid chalk without load spreaders, I would think that it has also been keyed into the chalk cliff which would mitigate the vertical load.

It was constructed when the ground below it was used as a funfair and is fairly typical of cliff facades in Thanet.

The portal, yellow bit, of the structure has all of the appearance of having no design at all, I believe part of it was constructed during WW2, the low portal served as an entrance to the tunnels used by HMD Fervent. The building below it abutted the cliff and served as an indoor amusement arcade, it was used by costal command as HMS Fervent.

I believe that the inclined chalk cliff was stepped for the portal pillars and that these were cast onto these steps.

The bases of these pillars appear to sit on made ground, in fact I think it possible that some of the façade was built directly onto the concrete floor of the arcade.

The block infills definitely sit on made ground although there may be some sort of concrete shelf keyed into the chalk behind, which forms a foundation for the blockwork.

Various parts of the main concrete structure of this part of the façade have shifted laterally since its construction the worst part of this was repaired using the anchored concrete badge method, there are brown streaks below the badge that think should be analysed and if they contain iron oxide the badge may need treating as suspect.

Rust there could be caused by spalling of the original structure but could also be caused by the anchors, as the rest of the repair contract has visible faults I have reservations about the way the badge was applied.

Normally the drilling and inserting into the cliff of the anchors is done by a specialist contractor and is unlikely to be suspect.

The block panel adjacent to the lift has no drain holes and the coating applied during the main contract is coming away at the bottom of it, I would think that water is entering from above there.

When the block panel was removed for replacement at the end of last year there was a gap visible between the chalk and the adjacent pillar.

It is important to understand that this concrete façade isn’t designed to support the cliff, in fact it is the cliff that supports the façade, so damaged to the stepped chalk could be very significant indeed.

Finally the mauve part, the one that worries me the most at the moment the part in the vicinity of the blocked drain.

Firstly I should say that I don’t think that this was what caused the render to come off at the weekend, I think this was caused by the roots of the plant growing above it and should be treated as a minor cliff maintenance problem along with the plant growth in the blockwork.

There has been some surface movement in this area over the past couple of years, minor subsidence and lateral shifting.

My main concerns relates to the brick pier (the mauve lump) immediately adjacent to the blocked drain and the panel of brickwork sitting on much more recent blockwork, this area is very uncertain and parts of this brick structure collapsed without warning immediately after being investigated by civil engineers just over forty years ago.

As the cliff is south facing the sun tends to dry out the surface of the brickwork.

I think an underlying problem here may be that the councils advising structural engineers were supervising engineers on the main repair contract.

Pleasurama cliff update

Work is in progress removing the loose bits of the cliff wall.

Is Thanet District Council prepared to put out lives at risk?

Of all of the strange situations that I have found myself in dealing with the council, this one I think takes the biscuit, and I have now made an official complaint about it.

On Monday I pointed out to them that there was a bit of lose masonry hanging about forty feet over people’s heads, well it’s Thursday and when I looked earlier today it was still there.

No warning sign no barriers, just hanging over a place where anyone can walk, anyone’s children play, it is just plain potty.

Hi this is a complaint relating to public safety and as such could you please deal with it expediently, please quote this reference in any reply Pleasurama complaint 71010.

The following is background to impress on you the urgency of this situation.

On 27th September 2010 I emailed the council’s engineer, chief of development services, chief executive, the officer dealing with the development and the leader of the council expressing concerns about the safety of the Pleasurama cliff.

On the same day I telephoned the HSE about the same issue, particularly with reference to the construction workers now working beneath the cliff.

On the 29th September 2010 the HSE telephoned me and told me, that they had contacted the council and that the chief of development services had assured them that there were no safety issues relating to the cliff.

During last weekend part of the cliff large enough to kill or seriously injure someone below, I would estimate that this cliff wall masonry weighed about 50 kilos fell from a height of about 15 metres, partly into the construction site and partly onto the public highway.

This has left further loose masonry hanging above where the building site joins the public highway.

On the following Monday 4th October 2010 I discussed this with the council’s engineer and was assured that some sort of action would be taken to make the site and public highway safe.

Not the proper and thorough examination of the cliff that I requested, but measures to remove the lose bits and or cordon off the area below them.

I have just visited the site and while the loose masonry is still hanging there no measures have been taken to protect the public.

I wish to complain that the council has taken no action in this instance to protect public safety and has failed in its duty of care.

How high is high tide at Ramsgate?

With the various developments proposed and ongoing on the foreshore in Ramsgate, most particularly the proposed one on the harbour slipways, I have been looking at the various tidal flood risk assessments.

I spent some time today discussing the flood risk assessment for the slipways development with the chap who wrote it and as far as I can see there have been various errors made and problems relating to access of full and accurate information both about the development and the local tide statistics, by the person writing the flood risk assessment.

One thing that is petty simple here is that the development is to be built on three levels, undercroft, ground and first floor. Unfortunately it seems that the planning sheet showing the undercroft wasn’t passed on to the firm preparing the flood risk assessment.

Engineering hat now, so I would suggest just taking my word that people in the bar the ground floor may get wet feet, unless you have some patience.

OK for those who are following into the higher country of the mind here, I want you to think about just exactly how high, high is. Start with something big that is easy to think about, Mount Everest is at 29,002 feet or 8,840 metres high, you can check this if you want, but the question you may not have asked is higher than what?

OK if you said sea level, you are doing pretty well here, but the sea goes up and down so what sea level?

If you live in Ramsgate then you have probably have seen the levels marked next to the lock gate, between the inner and outer harbour so you may think that it is level that I am talking about.

It indicates that the harbour wall is about 6 metres above sea level. So you would assume that the top of Mount Everest is 8,834 metres above the harbour wall in Ramsgate.

I am afraid to say that you may be wrong the levels written on the harbour are in chart datum, but when in 1856, the Great Trigonometric Survey of British India established the height of Everest the surveyors used ordnance datum.

Ordinance datum is 2.58 metres (about eight foot six inches) higher than chart datum.

Architects use ordnance datum on their planning sheets and information about tides and sea levels is measured in chart datum, make a mistake about this and you may be in deep water.

This wasn’t the mistake that happened with any of the plans for developments on Ramsgate’s foreshore, but I think the confusion around it helped to cover some up.

Now to save confusion here I am going to take off my engineers hat and put on my sailors hat, so it’s time to say, “hello sailor.” If you didn’t think I could do this see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2007/12/friggin-in-rigging.html or http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/cryfromthesea/index.htm

All of the figures below are in chart datum.

The lowest indoor bit of the proposed development on the slipways is 6.18 metres above chart datum.

I think some of the confusion has come from, the figure 5.4m is the MHWS for Ramsgate, the flood risk assessment takes this to be about the highest astronomical tide, this actually stands for mean high water spring, i.e. the average height of a spring tide and not the highest astronomical height.

HAT - Highest astronomical tide is the one they should have used the HAT at Dover is 7.3m the difference for Ramsgate is 1.6 giving a HAT for Ramsgate of 5.7

The highest recent tidal surge locally was 14th Feb. 1989 at 10:00 hours this was 1.84 metres above normal high tide registered on the Dover tide gauge, as tidal surges are caused by low barometric pressure the level would be about the same for Ramsgate.

I would think it reasonable to assume that adding the HAT at Ramsgate to the surge would give the best idea of the highest possible spring and surge level here i.e. 7.54 metres.

We would be very unlucky to have a tide this high now, the tidal surge of 1953 was 8.22 m at Dover which works out at 6.62 for Ramsgate, this surge was combined with a severe storm, though fortunately not a spring tide.

In the 1953 tida1 surge 1,835 people were killed in the Netherlands and 307 were killed in the United Kingdom and about 250 people were killed at sea, many of them sailors.

A problem with the sea is that it has waves, I suppose the fact that it killed over 2.500 people in this part of the world during one storm, is a testament to this.

This means that anyone contemplating building on our foreshore needs to consider how high the waves here can get.

Several factors determine how high the waves will get in a storm, once again there are different ways of expressing the height of a wave, as I have my sailors hat on I will use the one called significant height, this is the height difference between the trough between the waves and the crest on the waves.

One factor is the strength (speed) of the wind, as a sailor I will express this in knots, nautical miles per hour, a nautical mile is a little bit longer than a statute mile.

In the days of sail sailors measured the speed of their ship with a line with equally spaced knots tied in it and a lump of wood on the end. One of them dropped the bit of wood over the side and counted how many knots passed through his hands, while another one timed this with a glass, something like a big egg timer with sand running through it.

Another factor is the duration of the storm, the longer the wind blows for the higher the waves, this has a saturation time after which the waves don’t get any bigger.

Another factor is the fetch of the sea, this is how far it is between the shores along the line of the wind direction.

There are other factors but I think we will stick to those, otherwise it is going to get scientific and didn’t wear a hat when I worked as a scientist.

As Michael Fish said there won’t be a hurricane so we certainly don’t need to worry about 11 metre waves on a worse case scenario 7.45 metre tide.

You will be glad to know that the depth of water mitigates the height of the waves.

The worst we have had in recent years was in 1953, because of the wind direction we were sheltered in Ramsgate, the waves were also mitigated here because the fetch was across the Straights so Dover and not along the Channel.

I would say about 7 metre waves on a 6.62 metre tide.

The environment agency say that new developments should be assumed to have a life of 100 years, the best predictions for the rise in sea level by 2110 are between 1 and 2 metres, they are working on just over a metre.

They are saying that by then we should be expecting static tides of about 8 metres above sea level here in Ramsgate and building now to accommodate for them.

Obviously there have to be compromises here a balance between the worst case scenario, which is a 2 metre sea level rise and 7.45 metre tide with 11 metre waves and what is likely to happen in reality.

Normally anyone producing a flood risk assessment will have considered the sea defences in front of the development and how far behind them the waves will be broken up enough to stop them damaging the building.

This isn’t an option with the slipways development as it is to be built on a small pier, so the waves will be under it as well as in front of it.

With the Pleasurama development there hasn’t even been a flood risk assessment, so no one has even bothered to consider the problem.

Ramsgate Seafront Developments a bit of ramble

Having just phoned the architects for the slipway because their flood risk assessment just doesn’t make any sense, this is really case of time is running out to comment on the application and the flood risk assessment appears to have errors in it.

What is seems to be saying is something akin to the tallest person is four feet high, therefore we propose to build as house with all of the ceilings five feet high.

There are several examples of this in the document, here is one of them; it actually says on page eleven of the document is. “Spring tides can reach 5.4m above chart datum”.

This weeks tides see http://easytide.ukho.gov.uk/EasyTide/EasyTide/ShowPrediction.aspx?PortID=0102&PredictionLength=7 Thursday 5.4m, Friday 5.6, Saturday 5.7.

Now you would think that the architects would have something to say about this, some sort of explanation, but know it would seem that my only approach here is to use this as part of my grounds for objecting to the development.

Next door to this site is the pavilion and here they seem to be painting and filling the cracks in the outside, with no real reference to the problems inside the building.

Also this work seems to be going on without any thought to the flood protection, it would seem that a lot of money is to be spent on Margate’s flood protection, but nothing on Ramsgate’s.

I wonder if the council have read the wrong figures for a high tide in Ramsgate too, this is something that would explain quite a bit.

Over the road the building on the back of the Belgian Café is still proceeding with the windows about a metre lower that they should be according to the plans.

Back to my conversation with the architects for the slipway development, they really don’t seem to appreciate that what they are building is in fact a short pier and that the building of piers is a specialist business.

I asked about wave heights and the architect that I spoke to said that this wasn’t a problem with the Clock House, he didn’t seem to understand that the stone apron at the back of the Clock House dissipates the waves, something that doesn’t happen with a pier.

On to the Pleasurama site, all work seems to have stopped there now, understandable really now I know the sequence of events, which is.

Cardy Construction the people building the development started clearing the site about a month ago, this has exposed the bottom of the cliff wall, which frankly looks a bit dodgy.

I now know from the HSE that they expressed concerns about the cliff wall, foundations, weeds, cracks, strange damp patches and so on to the council.

The council reassured them saying that the cliff wall was perfectly safe and work continued.

Then a lump of it fell off that was big enough to kill someone below.

Now they have stopped work and left the site.

The HSE have now told me that they are going to send one of their construction engineers to visit the site.

During the war cliff maintenance, weed removal, keeping the drains clear and so on didn’t happen as people were busy fighting Hitler and after the war we had several cliff collapses in Ramsgate.

Once again and I don’t really know why cliff maintenance seems not be happening quite as it should, this is an example from another part of Ramsgate.
The picture above is of another blocked drain and illustrates what I mean about recent cliff maintenance about as clearly as I can.

The pictures below are of when this part of cliff in Ramsgate collapsed just agter the war.

The pictures apart from the one I took at the top, are courtesy of Margate Museum, click on them to enlarge them and click on them again to make them even bigger.

I should stress that this was only one of several cliff collapses in Ramsgate and that the most likely cause of them was poor maintenance.

The trouble is that once water has damaged the chalk cliff it stays damaged. It doesn’t really matter what is done to the cliff facades, it is the condition of the thousands of tons of chalk behind them that causes the problems.

In a natural state it is the sea undermines the chalk and the cliff steadily collapses at about the rate of a foot a year, so if man hadn’t intervened with sea defences then most of our famous cliff top buildings in Ramsgate would have already fallen into the sea.

I don’t fully understand the business of building foreshore and under cliff developments here in Thanet recently.

We had a spate of this mostly in Victorian times when either these were leisure buildings, most of which have now vanished, like Ramsgate and Margate piers or most of the other Thanet pavilions. Or they were major pieces of civil engineering integrated with the cliffs, like Westcliff Hall, The Winter Gardens or the arches in Ramsgate.

Now we seem to have a group of developers that only ever seem to have experience of building inland who seem to think that they can ignore the major civil engineering challenges posed by these sites and just build any old thing there.