Here is the painting of Deal Timeball and some fairly
typical Deal buildings
And here the photo for art critics
Cheese sarni and pot of tea about £7
Shopping in Deal today, a town that is still hanging in
there with numerous independent shops, the other side of this coin is more
shops closing at Westwood Cross H&M are the latest and will be closing on 6th
June.
I guess the difference I notice most with WC is that the
closed shops have a striking resemblance to the closed shops in “The Centre” in
Margate. I guess this partly down to modern building that aren’t that well
maintained looking pretty tacky when closed and partly due to newish shopping
centres just not aging well.
From my point of view as a retailer it is still fairly
difficult to see where retail is going, sales in my bookshop started going up around
the middle of last year after decreasing year on year for years. I have to
admit to not really having any idea why, I would doubt that people are reading
more physical books, or that my shop represents significant competition to Amazon,
although I do try to make sure that my book prices are less than online book
prices.
I do wonder just what the future is for fairly small out of
town shopping centres like WC, I only have a reasonable understanding of the
bookselling side of retail and everything I know about the book trade suggests
that the W H Smith and Waterstones there shouldn’t really work. By this I mean
that they replaced the two Albion Bookshops in Cliftonville and Broadstairs and
I can’t see how book sales in Thanet would have increased by that sort of
proportion.
Here are a few Deal photos
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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.