Tuesday 11 October 2016

Wetherspoons Royal Victoria Pavilion a step forward, some old Ramsgate pictures and a bit of a ramble

As you see from the photos the scaffolding is going up on the Pav, so I can realistically see Wetherspoons Royal Victoria Pavilion opening next year.



Here in the bookshop I have just finished helping someone trace their family back to where they lived in Ramsgate in 1849, we found them in the 1849 directory and on the 1849 map so now they have toddled off to see if the building their ancestors lived in is still there.

They had recently completed the much quicker and easier process of using the internet to trace their family back to 1066 and obviously had already been to Hastings to see the battlefield. I did however get the feeling that they were coming to the conclusion that perhaps there were some things written on the internet that were not entirely based on facts, and that it was just possible that at some point in 1250 someone hadn’t remembered to fill in a form properly.  

The medieval period, also spelt mediaeval and mediæval, is also called “the dark ages” and “the middle ages", covers the period from around 400 AD to around 1500 and from the historians point of view can be seen as a long and confused period where not only did hardly anyone ever write anything down, but in fact hardly anyone could read or write.

Of course The Venerable Bede did write a bit down about England in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in about 730 and there are the various Rolls, like The Great Rolls of the Pipe.

Anyway contemplating this business of tracing one’s family back to the conquest I sort of gave up and scanned some old photos of Ramsgate, here they are.





It is funny you know how little trace people leave, even my parent’s generation who were very much alive active and working twenty years ago, apart from a few family photo albums – mostly full of unidentified aunties and uncles, there isn’t very much.


In the middle ages you really needed to be landed gentry or a criminal to leave a mark, by the 1600s being a great artist could do the trick and by the 1800s a famous writer.
Oh yes anyone else noticed this boat floating above the water in the harbour?

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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.