Some old pictures of Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs and some thoughts on AI

 

Starting with the 1791 print of Ramsgate from the newly completed harbour, as a much inferior copy formed the frontispiece of Richardson's Fragments of History there are a lot of copies on the internet. This is a good copy of my 1791 original that should expand well with a bit of compulsive clicking.  

Next an undated aerial view of Broadstairs.

Next Margate Harbour in 1857

I have various interests which include painting and drawing, photography and technology. In the last couple of weeks I have been hit by AI this is because both my phone and tablet have had the new Samsung AI update. This has the facility to draw a rudimentary sketch of something and have AI turn it into a questionable work of art .

My ignorance of AI is considerable and most importantly I realised that I had virtually as zero chance of being able to identify what was produced by AI and what was produced by human being.

Anyway I have started by feeding a few of my own paintings into the AI sketch to image generator https://deep-image.ai/ so here is the first example.

This is a watercolour I painted inside Canterbury Cathedral. I fed it into the image generator and told the image generator that it is a watercolour of the inside of the chancel of Canterbury Cathedral.  

So a moderately good effort from AI apart from no alter and the pews facing the wrong way. 

The AI generator isn't vey good with facial likenesses

I fed in this sketch of Picasso, just putting Picasso in the text part

And it came up with this.

Then I tried the half finished watercolour of Donald Trump that I did halfway through American election day

I only put watercolour in the text box and it came up with this.

Back to Ramsgate, here at Michaels Bookshop where I pretend to work and at the moment I am writing this blog post, it's a reasonably busy day. A few of the days last week were very quiet indeed so I was beginning to wonder if what has happened in Ramsgate town centre was rubbing off on the bookshop the Saturday and today have been ok. Here is the link to the books that we have just priced and put out for sale 

I have to say this January but I haven't been able to buy anything I wanted in Ramsgate apart from in Waitrose comma ASDA, Aldi, elephant in the room and I can't think of anything else. I did sell all the old and redundant technology, phones tablets etc to CeX which enabled me to upgrade my tablet to a Samsung galaxy S8. I've been to Westwood cross in the last week and frankly that wasn't particularly good either I eventually resorted to shopping in Canterbury which also has lost a great many useful shops. 

 

An interesting old Ramsgate picture, a bit of sketching in Margate

 

Ramsgate Sands Station 1920s or 30s

The picture above expands normally the one below is the high res file and should expand to much larger in case anyone can get better resolution out of it.

Starting with this picture taken from inside the old station that closed in the 1920s and was situated on Ramsgate seafront where The Royal Sands development is now. I have seen it called "Ramsgate Harbour Station" and "Ramsgate Sands Station" Does anyone know which is right?

The S R Port on the side of the horse drawn wagon was a builders merchant and builder in Ramsgate High Street.

The photo just fell out of a secondhand book I was pricing here, where I work at Michaels Bookshop here in Ramsgate. Apart from being closed on Sundays the bookshop is closed on weekdays beginning with T, so yesterday afternoon we headed off to Margate for the sunset.

This is an unedited photo of Margate Sands taken with my mobile phone and I think sums up my reason for going there.

I didn't go to the exhibition at Turner Contemporary as I have seen it before.

But I did do a quick sketch from Turner Contemporary Cafe, sitting in the sunshine, which if anything was too hot. 

We did of course buy quite a lot of books in Margate mostly from The Old Bank Bookshop these should appear in our new acquisitions 

Click to expand the historic Thanet pictures, some thoughts on shops and shopping in Ramsgate and of course a Christmas ramble

 So starting with some archive photos of Ramsgate shops.

Of course back in the day Ramsgate was full of, "are you being served" shops, a situation based mostly on shop staff being paid poverty wages and real estate values being relatively low. 

Although Michaels Bookshop where I work in Ramsgate is a secondhand bookshop we do sell new Thanet local history books and maps. That is both the ones we publish and ones published by other people. Mainly though this is a secondhand bookshop and over recent years buying secondhand books for presents has become much more acceptable. Obviously in a lot of cases you can't really tell if a book is secondhand, so there is that aspect too. Anyway one way or another it's a very busy day here. 

I think the main factor is price and as most of the books we sell are cheaper than you can get on the internet we are selling a lot of books and of course with people's financial pressures we are also buying a lot of books. 

With Ramsgate itself this year, the question. Is it Busy? Doesn't have a simple answer. There are certainly a lot fewer non food shops where you can buy something tangible, so not much Christmas shopping round the town.

Christmas celebration wise Wetherspoons in Ramsgate is so busy that it is often difficult to get seats, meaning over 1,000 customers, while many of the other venues are virtually empty. Price again, with the wholesale price of cheap beer just under £1 a pint cheap beer in Wetherspoons is around £2, as you would expect. In most of the other venues cheap beer seems to be over £4 a pint and so they are mostly empty. Back in the 1960s and 70s when I did bar work in Ramsgate, the pump price was roughly double the barrel price so what's going on here doesn't make sense.

With Broadstairs and shopping I suppose that it's Westwood Cross that has substantially less shops every year but does have a lot more in terms of amusements. 


On to Margate 

Not sure if these are brewery staff outing or where outings ended up

This is the entry to the jetty and a view I hadn't seen before

 

And yes here is the jetty.

Happy Christmas all round

1872 Ramsgate Street Map, a quick sketch in Turner Contemporary Margate where I view "Anya Gallaccio: preserve" exhibition.

 

1872 Ramsgate Street Map

Here where I work at Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate we sell reprints of some historic local maps to compliment our stock of local books about The Isle of Thanet. Yesterday I went to Margate and bought the map in the picture above. 

Here is a link to what I hope is a bigger size of the picture of the map

We already sell a slightly different 1872 street map of  Ramsgate and I hope that when I have got this one properly scanned and printed it will add the the range of historic maps we have available. At the moment, if you want to enjoy the map then this phone photo through glass is the best there is. There are also some other versions of 1872 OS maps on the National Library of Scotland website. 1872 was the year that the survey was done so 1872 is a date that appears a lot on our maps.

When it comes to historic street maps that we sell and you may want to put on your wall, a lot depends on when your house was built and where your house is located within the town. 

We sell these historic maps rolled up and as they are too difficult (expensive) to post you have to come here to Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate to look at them and possibly buy them 

With historic maps of Margate there are several on The Margate Local History Website Paper sheet maps of Margate are a bit thin on the ground and I promise to do some eventually.

The copyright situation with historic maps is:-

Maps published by United Kingdom government departments are covered by Crown Copyright, which usually lasts for 50 years from the end of the year in which the map was published. For example, Crown Copyright on a map published in December 1970 would usually pass out of copyright in January 2021. For a map published in January 1971, copyright would usually expire in January 2022. Maps produced by Ordnance Survey or the UK Hydrographic Office are covered by Crown Copyright.

Copyright in maps published by commercial companies and private institutions usually lasts for 70 years from the end of the year in which the map was published. For example, maps produced by the John Bartholomew & Son, Harvey Maps or Stirling Surveys, are usually in copyright for 70 years from the end of the year in which the map was published.

Copyright in maps made by named individuals usually lasts for 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the last remaining author of the work died. For works with unknown authorship created before 1 August 1989, copyright will expire on 31 December 2039 if the work was created before 1 January 1969; otherwise, copyright expires 70 years from the end of the year in which the work was created.

On to visiting Turner Contemporary art gallery where the main exhibition is called Anya Gallaccio: preserve. here is the link to the page about it on Turner Contemporaries website 

Pictures of the exhibition will expand if you click a bit.

I am afraid that I don't understand contemporary art very well and this exhibition smells strongly of rotting vegetation, so I didn't stay very long.

I had a bowl of soup and a cup of tea in Turner Contemporary Café, the quality was OK and it set me back a tenner, which I thought could have been worse. 

I painted a quick sketch in my sketchbook so I could remember the visit  
 

Click to expand, pictures of Broadstairs, Margate, Ramsgate and an optical illusion from the bookshop in Ramsgate

 

Aerial photo of Broadstairs probably early to mid 50s

Tug Aid in Ramsgate Harbour

Tug Vulcan in Ramsgate Harbour

Dent De Lion Gatehouse

 Pier Hotel Margate Advert

Unknown location probably north Thanet

The next bit of this blog post is about me drawing an optical illusion and how the inspiration came. This is mostly me talking to a future me for my reference, but also people ask about these things.

I was looking drawings by Salvador Dali, on my phone, in bed, Sunday morning (yesterday) and felt there was something about the shapes in this one that was worth further investigation.

Nostalgic Echo Dali

The Nostalgic Echo (1935) by Salvador Dali  illustration for the frontispiece of the book Nuits Partagees (Shared Nights), poems by Paul Éluard.

So I sketched this 

Which developed into this impossible object, instead of three dimensions it has four or five, I think. What do you think?

As you probably know I work at Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate so the next stage was to represent my impossible object as a book.

Optical Illusion Drawing of a Book

Here is the result, I think this will be the draft for a painting. I think that as optical illusions go this one is to some extent original to me. This is fairly unusual with pen and paper optical illusions, so I am pleased about it.  

Here where I work at Michaels Bookshop we have more newly acquired secondhand books here is the link to the pictures of them