Thursday 7 May 2015

A watercolour sketch from Fredericks Tea Room in Westgate-on-Sea, a lovelier Lovelys Art Shop in Cliftonville and maybe some thoughts.


Here is the watercolour sketch from Fredericks Tea Room in Westgate-on-Sea, part of the cinema building, and what a building, although not mentioned in Pevsner (sic Newman) even in a derisory way. It’s a Swiss-Gothic style 1910 extravaganza originally built as a town hall. Westgate-on-Sea just wasn’t big enough for a town hall of these proportions, and in 1912, it was transformed into the Town Hall Cinema. In 1932, it was renamed the Carlton Cinema.


I was hoping to find somewhere to sketch the whole building from, however even if you could find somewhere and sketch around the traffic and parked cars, today most of the town hall’s roadworks equipment was parked outside the building obscuring it even more.


Really Fredericks Tea Room is the only place to sit down and have lunch in that part of Westgate-on-Sea, and of course that is in the building I wanted to sketch.


On to Lovelys in Northdown Road Cliftonville, where they have expanded their artist’s materials department.  







Here are the rest of the photos on my phone




























2 comments:

  1. Is the Cinema still functioning Michael in St Mildred’s road? Memories of Espresso coffee after a cuddle in the back row then a walk along the esplanade before having to catch the train back to Ramsgate. The ornate structure above the shops hasn’t changed; I can imagine your disappointment finding the frontage being used as a corporation car park, another day perhaps?

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  2. Alan all still there and functioning as expected, a proper cinema…

    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.