From the point of view of the local historian one of the
most irritating things about the local historians of the past is that while
they attempt to describe what the local area was like hundreds of years before
they were born, they do very little to describe what the local area was like
when they were alive.
This means that here in Thanet the tourist guides written at
different times for people visiting the area are an invaluable tool as they set
out to describe the area to people from a different place if not a different
time.
So assuming that the past is a foreign country we can make
use of a guide for foreigners, the guide I have just reprinted after 75 years
even as a two page French supplement, the view from a foreign country can in a
sense become the past.
Tourist guides to this area started in the 1770s and as you
can see from the picture, which shows some of the ones I have reprinted, I have
been busy.
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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.