Well as you see McDonald’s has closed, there is a rumour
that Burger King are interested in taking over the site, however this is a bit
of a tenuous one.
Personally I think that this is part of a much bigger issue
that is retail and related to the overheads of shop properties in town centres.
The problem being that while all of the overheads (rent, rates, heat, light,
wages. Etc) have risen and continue to rise, footfall and shop takings have
fallen and may continue to fall.
I am not really sure what the solution is but UK towns take
much of their character from the businesses in them and much of the social life
of UK towns is based around the businesses in them.
This closure is particularly hard on the Ramsgate’s youth,
and I doubt is will improve their behaviour.
I have just finished the proofing stage of Rosemary
Quested’s book, The Isle of Thanet Farming Community: An Agrarian History of
Easternmost Kent… this is part of the business of turning a 400 page ordinary
format paperback, which is not sustainable, into an A4 stapled format which I
can print here in my bookshop, making it sustainable.
By way of explanation, I have about 160 local books and maps
in print and where I to get them printed by another company, this would mean
print runs of about 1,000 to make the cost economical. Multiplying the number
of titles by the print run would mean 160,000 books and maps to store, and if
they cost £2.50 each to print and investment of over a quarter of a million.
On the blogging front I have to apologise for the recent
lack of contentious posts, the irony here is that with my bookshop being so
much busier, I just haven’t had the time.
The Manston Airport site saga goes on, the latest being the
current owners new website about it http://yourqa.co.uk/
put together by Pillory Barn.
I guess as a historian one of the questions I ask is, what
would Manston be today if the airstrip hadn’t been put there for WW1? Initial
research suggests that the soil there was too thin over the chalk and therefore
not good enough for profitable farming, in around 1900 Messrs Payne and Thorp
came to Margate with the intention of turning the site into housing and by 1916
a large number of plots had been sold but not yet built on when the government
cpo-ed them for the airfield.
The Pleasurama saga goes on, as far as I can see the
underlying issue here is that the council is selling the site as suitable for
building the approved development, I guess the main snag to this is that the
council are effectively guaranteeing that the cliff façade will be in a
condition suitable for people to live under for the life of the development. I
think this will mean a considerable expense to local taxpayers for the next 100
years, because of the costs of maintaining the 70 foot high concrete wall from
the base of the 70 foot deep 12 foot wide canyon between the cliff and the
development. I guess the main issue from the developer’s point of view was
putting pad foundations on the old sand beach without first investigating the
structural integrity of the sea defence holding the sand in place, a situation
being made more critical by the rapidly denuding Ramsgate Main Sands. All that
said, Cardy Construction are a reputable local firm that employ local labour
and I am inclined to trust them to produce a good and safe development.
Whilst progress at pleasurama is to be applauded, leaving the taxpayer liable for the cliff face is foolhardy in the extreme.
ReplyDeleteAny lender on the property both during construction and ever after will be asking for reports and be unlikely to lend in any event of doubt being cast, is TDC really putting itself up for such an open ended liability, if so it would be better to leave the site as it is, if not this millstone will sink local finances sooner or later.
Surely the main driver on the demise of Ramsgate and Margate as town centres was the decision of the district council to give permission to build Westwood cross shopping centre. Small towns can survive but not with a large out of town shopping centre with 3 pubs and half a dozen eateries within 3 miles.
ReplyDeleteArtiglio I would rather have had a new planning application that would have been compliant with the standards of 2015 than using the plans that were prepared for a developer who didn’t understand the limitations of this site, particularly the cliff and flood limitations. Leaving the site derelict is not an option that appeals to me, as it is so economically damaging to the town.
ReplyDeleteUnknown I guess that WC isn’t doing that well either in view of the recent closures, the problems of towns forming around trading centres and then the traders moving away and now eventually onto the internet probably needs some sort of government intervention, but I am not sure what would work.