I think these are in the 1915 to 1920 ball park
We have had a fairly large batch of Bygone Kent Magazine
come into the bookshop, see http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/all-bygone-kent-in-bookshop.html
Oh yes and here my moan to the council:-
Re:
council's development in King Street Ramsgate
Hi Bob, I’m not happy about this one so please send it for further
review.
Obviously trying to have some sort of dialogue with the council
when the previous emails are removed by the officer replying to you isn’t
particularly productive when communicating with me, so can you please not do
this and reply to emails in the ordinary way without deleting the previous
correspondence.
So for clarity I will reiterate the main points.
Firstly I first pointed this out over two years ago in my planning
objection.
The main issue, which is building a decent housing block and then
arranging the ground floor in such a way that the flats there are to all
intents and purposes uninhabitable, will only result in bad ground floor
tenants and souring the whole block, ultimately giving the council time
consuming and expensive problems.
I assume that either you or someone you can discuss this with has
been to the pub, followed by the club and wound up at the takeaway in the early
hours of the morning.
I have lived and traded in this part of King Street since 1987, in
that time more than twenty broken shop windows, regular drunken brawls outside,
I am not suggesting that this problem is peculiar to Thanet or Ramsgate. From
experience having had numerous shops in various towns, the combination of
taking an area in the town centre, removing from the town centre policing zone
and licensing the takeaways there until 4 am will produce this situation pretty
much anywhere. It is a fact of life that the very drunk will head for the
takeaway in the early hours and if the area where the takeaways are is
inadequately policed, there will be a considerable amount of nighttime noise at
best, with fights broken windows and serious antisocial behaviour at
worse.
As the developer has boarded up all of the completed ground floor
windows they are obviously also aware of the problem too.
What the council has done here is to build living accommodation
with bedrooms that have conventional pvc windows that have sills at about knee
height facing onto a street in the part of a town that is very lively at night.
I don’t see how anyone holding down an ordinary job, or how any
child engaged in normal education could attempt to sleep in one of these
bedrooms and also function in any useful or meaningful way.
Obviously going down the road of housing normal families there,
them discovering that the layout of their flats makes them uninhabitable and
eventually the council putting in tenants who will accept any accommodation,
will then result in the whole block being soured.
I have discussed this verbally with various council officers, all
of whom have both understood my points and verbally promised to address them,
subsequent emails in councilspeak are neither constructive nor are the helpful.
The situation prior to the council purchasing the property was
shop which had steel mesh window grills at night, although it was in a fully
let shopping parade opposite the town’s main shopping car park (most women who
do most of the shopping won’t use the multi-storey, which smells of urine) this
shop appears to have been subject to a land banking operation, I know it sold
at auction about ten years ago for around £75k and I guess the council paid a
lot more for it.
Solutions could be returning the ground floor frontage to retail,
armoured glazing with decorative grills combined with moving the bedrooms away
from the front, offices, some sort of local amenity.
This was in reply to
14 September 2016
Dear Mr Child
Thank you for your recent communication which was received on 13/09/2016 concerning the council's development in King Street Ramsgate.
In your complaint you raise the question of the level of windows of the ground floor flats and their relationship to the footpath.
The council acquired the previously disused retail premises with the intention of converting it to affordable rented residential accommodation. The site was previously disused and derelict and had a significantly negative impact on the area.
The project will provide both much needed new homes and contribute to the regeneration of the area. This is one of a number of sites that the council is working on in King Street, and together we are confident that these will have a positive impact ont he appearance and amenity of the area.
The council was necessarily constrained in design by the previous buildings on the site, which have been retained wherever possible. The specific designs, including window heights were considered as part of the planning process and approved as now constructed. It is not possible to change the design of the elevations and windows at this stage in the development.
Although I understand the concerns that you raise about the impact of local take away establishments, it is anticipated that the introduction of more residential accommodation in the area will help to improve the surveillance and management of the area and reduce any incidents of anti-social behaviour. The new homes will remain in council ownership and be managed by East Kent Housing. We will investigate any complaints from residents about anti-social behaviour, and if necessary work with local food outlets to help resolve any problems that may occur int he future.
We hope that this resolves the matter to your satisfaction.
If you are not happy with our response, you may write to us with your reasons within the next ten working days, requesting a further and final review.
Please quote the above reference number and address your communication to Lynda Howard at lynda.howard@thanet.gov.uk - Customer Feedback Co-ordinator, Community Services.
Yours sincerely
Bob Porter
Head of Housing
So assumed they were going to call it The Marie
Antoinette, it’s looking like there will be no guillotine on the Pleasurama
site then
Oh and Wetherspoons have announced that The Royal Victoria Pavilion
will be called The Royal Victoria Pavilion, you could have knocked me down with
a feather…
The English heritage listing says:- “Originally built as a
Concert Hall and Assembly Rooms in 1903. Designed by Stanley Davenport. Adshead
and built by F.G. Minter of Putney. Ostensibly in the style of a Robert Adam
orangery and based on the Little Theatre at Versailles; the whole was aimed as
an exercise in the Adam style. Designed in 1 week, to be built in 6 weeks in
time for the 1903 season.”
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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.