Sunday, 12 July 2015

Some thoughts on Roller Skating in Thanet

It’s been a bit of a roller skating weekend for me, so sitting here somewhat bruised, due to the falling over aspect I thought that I had better do my duty on the local history front.


First let me clarify what I mean by roller skating is the business done with skates that have four wheels, one in each corner, like the skates in the picture.


The first properly documented proof I have of this activity occurring in Thanet is in 1879, this picture shows the roller rink at The Granville in Ramsgate and comes from a London Illustrated News supplement about the Granville in Ramsgate, click on this link if you want to read the whole thing http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/gt/id7.htm


It would appear from the picture. What? Perhaps the skater in the picture has made the mistake I made earlier and has put his reading glasses on to read a text message and while trying to extract his smart phone from a tight pocket has just realised that not only do reading glasses make the floor appear all blurry but also make objects on said floor appear in a different place. Actually probably not.

Although Victorian women appear to be involved in roller skating, they don’t appear to actually skate, I guess that as modesty conventions of the time wouldn’t have allowed them to wear trousers or show even hosed leg above the ankle, learning to skate would have been tricky

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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.