Manston Airport and why the cpo is dead in the water, T.S. Royalist in Ramsgate Harbour and a few sketches.

The issue here is the criteria of cpos, which boils down to taking land away from a private company or individual having to be in the public interest, and this having to be decided not at district council level but at UK national government level.

Always in the case of cpos if the public interest is in the balance then the judgment is made on the side of the existing owners. So at best from the point of view of reopening the airport you can only really have a proposal that may or may not work, and may or may not provide significant economic benefit, I don’t think anyone – particularly given Manston’s history of economic failure as an airport – would or could say that any airport project on the site would be guaranteed to succeed. On the other hand you have the site’s new owner with a track record of succeeding with discovery parks, see http://www.wynyardpark.com/about so there is a no case to say thta thier project would definately fail. 

For a cpo to succeed you would have to go well past the balance of buying the site by cpo for another project by a different owner being more likely to succeed.

The problem here is that sma, quite a few of the TDC councillors and even an MP have managed to deluded themselves into the position where they feel that TDC have some sort of ultimate power to decide whether a cpo can take place, and seem to think that if they manage to put together some reasonable project in a similar risk band to the one the new owner is proposing then a cpo is likely to happen.

All that is happening at the moment is firstly, public money and officer time is being wasted pursuing this and secondly the politicians who haven’t worked out the situation are harming their political futures.

Essentially you have the UK government, KCC on the side of discovery parks with virtually every part of the country trying to get them in their area and then of course Thanet.

Anyway I bunged the above up as a comment yesterday and have now headed this post with it because of some of the conversations I have had with people today, this isn’t anything to do with being for or against the airport but to do with facing reality.

 Two sketches of T. S. Royalist done from the western harbour arm, in both cases the hull came out too short

 I gather she is here until the weekend so I will try to get a morning sketch (when the sun is behind me) from the eastern harbour arm where i should get a clear view of the whole hull and hopefully manage something a bit better.

 A quickie in Turner contemporary as I am working on trying to improve people's faces in sketches and on the whole there is no hassle sketching in art galleries

 A couple of sketches from Cafe G in margate

 I was particularly pleased with the sketch of the person reading a paper which was on the sofa beside her, a difficult angle to capture. Of course there is the Emanuel Kant factor here which is that the artist, me, is trying to do. what? I suppose get the viewer, you, to take the pictures that are already in your head and draw something that is a catalyst to memori, imagio feminas in this instance, sorry about the odd mixture of Latin and obscure english, but I don't think English alone has a tense for expressing the the priori concept of a non existent woman as a direct object.

 here the opposite of the width problem the thing on the top of the custom house came out too tall