A ramble about phone batteries, Harbour Street in Ramsgate, The Ramsgate Society shop, clearing the Pavillion and anything else that comes to mind.

I have had some technological problems in the last few days, first it was my phone, some days perfectly ok and others the battery was discharging completely in about an hour and a half.

I think I have nailed this down to it being supplied with a travel charger that only delivered a trickle charge, it took nearly all night to charge and I didn’t give this much thought until the battery began discharging suddenly. I think what happened was that as the battery got older the phone didn’t register it charging properly because of the slow rate of charge. Essentially it thought the battery was full up when in fact it was nearly empty. A more powerful charger seems to have sorted the problem out.

Now it is the computer in my bookshop, blue screen and all that stuff.

The Ramsgate Society shop looks to be going to open in Harbour Street next week, my guess is that this will cost the society around £7,000 for a year in overheads, so they will need to sell some stuff to cover this.

Harbour Street never seemed to recover from the closure of Lewis and Hyland and Timothy Whites, I think this is mostly down to parking and changing parking rules and facilities.  

Cafés don’t seem to do well in Harbour Street I would think because of the proximity of Harbour Parade with the better view.

Parking for shopping in Ramsgate seems mostly to happen either in the supermarket car parks or Staffordshire Street car park, a lot of people avoid the multi-storey because it is unpleasant and unpredictable.    

I don’t think any of the women I know will park in it if they are alone in the car, and this means most of the surviving shops are huddled around Staffordshire Street and Waitrose.

Various levels of government will do everything the can to encourage the use of public transport, bicycles and walking but most of my customers still come to my bookshop by car.

And now I guess the local councils will do anything they can to spread the shops away from the car parks, but I can’t see anything much in the way of shopping happening beyond the top of Harbour Street.

Ramsgate Revival is Harbour Street’s latest victim, what does seem to work there are phone shops.

There was one of the very largest cherry pickers in Harbour Parade today. 

  

Work seems to have started on clearing The Royal Victoria Pavillion, presumably in preparation to it becoming the largest pub on earth, I wonder what happened to the public consultation process.