Monday 4 February 2008

The Marina Esplanade


The Marina Esplanade was once an area of interesting Victorian buildings that complimented those above on the cliff most especially The Granville. From the Victorian railway (later to become Pleasurama) to the to the Marina Theatre and Electric Picture Palace (later to become Nero’s) the whole area had a special charm.

I returned to Ramsgate 20 years ago to open the bookshop and for some time I hade no dispute with the council or developers over the preservation of our heritage, until the day they decided to demolish the Marina Theatre. I found that my protests at loosing a significant Victorian building (significant both to the town the history of theatre and cinema) fell on deaf ears. I wonder if there are any plans to rebuild it, I am afraid the council performed this act of vandalism, so there won’t be any developer to force to pay for it.

The Victorian station that burnt down belonged to the council, was it insured? If so where did the insurance money go?

This area had then three major Victorian buildings of historical and architectural importance the station, theatre and restaurant, to lose one building may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness but to lose all three.
Click here for more historical detail and some pictures of the area.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting snippet from the planning department at TDC,
    VAT does not apply to the cost of alterations to listed buildings, although it does apply to repairs and ordinary maintenance.

    So knocking it down and rebuilding would save the developer thousands of pounds in VAT,is there any word from the council yet or is their position still the same as at the weekend?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Took a drive down there this evening and realised how dramatic the 'repair' was. Unfortunately I would almost put money on it not being replaced....

    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.