My bookshop in Ramsgate is closed on Thursdays and I went to
various places to look at books, some of which I bought, having been to
Tankerton I then went on to Herne Bay and heading back to the car along the
seafront the main focal point is the clock tower.
I am often conscious of two things looking at this clock
tower, one is that it is one of my favourite structures in the area and the
other is the way it has been rubbished by architectural experts.
Does this mean I just don’t have good taste? To me it seems
well proportioned, I particularly like the way the central cylinder continues
up through it.
I have painted it several times and honestly all I can think
on the subject of it’s design is how difficult it is to sketch without the cylindrical
centre getting out of line.
Here is what it has to say about it in the main Kent
architectural guide:- “By Edwin F. Dangerfield, 1837. Portland stone tower of
four stages, raised on seven steps. The inept design is instructive: the
classical vocabulary thus debased was ripe for attack. Square round stage, with
Greek Doric columns in threes at corners: then a stage with Corinthian columns
in the same scale, which means that they look absurdly big. After that Mr
Dangerfield hurriedly finished off with a pedimented cube and an octagonal
domed top.”
Anyway today I noticed this metal plaque on the side and now
I look at it completely differently.
I finished up in Margate where I bought more books and then
headed off to Turner Contemporary art gallery, the exhibition of JWM Turner’s
paintings there at the moment is just completely overwhelming. So having been
overwhelmed I sat in the gallery’s café and sketched for a bit, apologies to
any victims, but isn’t life is like that.
Finally on to the photos of Ramsgate
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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.