Tuesday 9 September 2008

The New Baths at Margate in 1828

This plate was engraved for the 4 volume book: England’s Topographer. A New & Complete History of Of Kent from The Earliest Records to The Present Time. Including Every Modern Improvement. Embellished with a Series of Views From Original Drawings. With Historical Topographical Critical & Biographical Delineations……. by W H Ireland.

Ireland is most famous for producing fake Shakespeare’s of his own authorship and trying to sell them for large amounts of money. Known at the time as Shakespeare Ireland, his history of Kent was slated by the critics when first published. “Irelands history of Kent is a miserable performance, with pretensions to being a county history……….he does not appear to have visited the county…….” In those days before modern libel laws literary criticism was somewhat more robust than it is today.

I publish a cheap reprint of the Isle of Thanet section in the book and one day, given time, I hope to reprint more sections on the other parts of Kent.

As this book contains a great many engraved plates sad to say it is often broken up and the plates hand coloured and framed.

3 comments:

  1. You will be pleased to know Michael the former Clifton Baths have just been grade two listed. Full story at www.thanetextra.co.uk - along with a nice photo of a 1920s artist's impression of the redeveloped version.

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  2. Fascinating stuff! Is this in the same location as the current Lido pool?

    And anon, check out this (& the link to photos provided by Michael):
    http://margatearchitecture.blogspot.com/2008/09/clifonville-baths-granted-listed-status.html

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  3. I believe it is the same site but the baths were changed extensively click here to see what it looks like now

    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.