Saturday 26 April 2008

Killing Ramsgate’s café culture

As you will have noticed from the papers this week TDC have said that they intend to go ahead with the Pleasurama development without a flood risk assessment, against the advice of the environment agency.

This means that the building work will start soon and that heavy construction lorries will be bringing in the building materials through the heart of or café culture. Building dust on you cappuccino and all over your dinner.

I suggested that the building materials be brought in down the old mainline railway tunnel, which would mean that none of the heavy construction materials came into the town at all, I don’t believe that they bothered to look at the idea seriously.

That means that there are only two routes to the building site right through the café culture that is thriving and expanding, and appears to be what is stopping the towns economy collapsing in the way Margate’s has, or down the arched slope and along Marina Esplanade.

I had previously been lead to believe that the arches were not strong enough to take the weight of the lorries, however when I pointed out that the main sands car park had been removed for a roundabout for busses to turn and that busses were also heavy, I was assured by TDC that the slope was able to take 40 tones.

So they can’t have it both ways and although it may be a little unpleasant for the people in the few remaining buildings left on Marina Esplanade, when the alternative is damaging the whole towns economy it is obvious that the building material should come in that way provided it’s safe.

The pictures were taken last summer and I find it difficult to see how construction vehicles would fit in.

1 comment:

  1. I popped over to Ramsgate this afternoon to drop someone off and in the early evening at 6.00pm, the harbour area in your photograph was busy and bustling, making the seafront and town at Margate look dead in contrast. How mad to disrupt this thriving area with construction traffic. Almost as bad as ignoring Environmental Agency advice to carry out a Flood Risk Assessment.

    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.