My latest publication Ramsgate All Change; Railway in the News at Ramsgate by David Richards is published today. Its mostly about the railway building and accidents that have occurred in the town.Steam played a major part in the development of Ramsgate, prior to 1816 the journey from London to Ramsgate was a difficult and arduous one, either by horse drawn coach or sailing hoy.
In June 1816 the first paddle steamer, The Duke of Argyle, arrived at Margate and by 1826 a regular and reliable service had been established to Ramsgate.
Ramsgate was an ideal destination for wealthy London families that came here for the summer season; initially they rented the houses that had been built for the officers that were stationed here during the Napoleonic wars. However soon the demand for accommodation was such that many fine Georgian and regency houses were built.
On April 13th 1846 Ramsgate was the first of the Thanet towns to be connected to the main Kent railway network, a branch line continued on to Margate opening on December 1st 1846.
Ramsgate’s prosperity has been directly related to the time that the journey from London takes and it is hoped that the introduction of the Javelin class trains will considerably reduce this time and herald a new period of prosperity.
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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.