Wednesday 2 November 2016

Looking up King Street in Ramsgate in Ramsgate in 1903 and further ramblings from the bookshop.

Was it some sort of funny lens? I hear you ask. Well no this was before the High Street end of King Street was widened.

If you click frantically on the picture, particularly if you are reading this on my blog and not on facebook, the picture should expand enough for you to read PRINCE ALBERT this was the pub – now demolished that stood where Bartlett and White greengrocers (recently Payne’s) is now.


When it comes to then and now pictures, this is both now and not much help.









The rest of the old pictures, Ramsgate, Margate and Cliftonville, well I’ve done my caption for the King Street one and the Margate one is going begging for anyone who wants a go.

Following with yesterdays post about the large number of empty shops in Ramsgate I walked up Ramsgate High Street during my lunch break today and took photos of the ones there.











I think a significant problem is developing and that the situation I Ramsgate is now worse than most of the other towns in East Kent. I should stress here that I am not just having a moan here, but looking for solutions.

First port of call should really TDC, but frankly this is difficult, their focus when it comes to Ramsgate is something I find incomprehensible. They have just built social housing opposite me and despite my trying to reason with them it has bedroom windows with sills that people can sit on by the pavement in a street where they have licensed the takeaways until 4am – expensive uninhabitable accommodation. Recently they have put considerable resources into trying to put Ramsgate under the flight path of a highly polluting airfreight hub and turning the port Ramsgate into another freight hub and heavy industrial site.

And yes I would like a port I could take a passenger ferry from and an airport I could take a passenger flight from but rather in the way I would like a railway station I can catch a train from as opposed to a rail freight hub that I can’t.

There is KCC but they seemed to be mostly focused on West Kent, any ideas anyone?


The bit of information that resulted from yesterday’s post that may be useful, if not for resolving Ramsgate’s problem at lest for understanding it better is that business premises that are listed buildings don’t have to have business rates paid on them when they are empty.

3 comments:

  1. Michael, OK I'll take the bait.

    Presumably, an aeroplane that carries just freight is a pollutant and therefore not acceptable. Whereas, the same aeroplane that carries you off somewhere is magically not a pollutant and acceptable.

    Even you are are not that contrary, so I assume that you're hit harvesting.

    [Do not try the ploy of cargo aircraft pollute more 'cos they don't]

    ReplyDelete
  2. John I think the air pollution issue is a complex one and a road that we have been down before, the main parts of which are the already high levels of particulate pollution in Thanet and the contribution to it made by diesel and jet engines.

    Up until recently you bought a diesel car, it cost less to run and everyone though you were smart. Now we know the engine produces tiny particles that bury themselves deep in everyone’s lung tissue, potentially lending to lung cancer and other nasty diseases, well next time it will probably be a petrol engine or even an electric motor in the car.

    On that front I think my main concern has been the 747 type freight planes which burn a ton of avderv for every movement here in Thanet, landing or takeoff.

    On the noise front when the airport was last operational, we had the KLM passenger planes and the 747 type freight planes and honestly the passenger planes were much quieter.

    But yes caught with my pants down again shamelessly promoting my bookshop one of the most dubious and harmful local enterprises, in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are caught reading books.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michael, You are way behind the times regarding current current cargo aircraft. I will not discuss this with you bearing in mind your long standing bias against Manston Airport. You are an SHP man. Perchance Mallon buys your books, if that is all it takes. Presumably you live in the hope that all those new homeowners will buy lots from you.

    That's all the hits you will get out of me on this subject. If you are lucky the Barry James may dive in. His comments are always an immense contribution to the debate on any subject. [There Michael, I have laid the bait].

    ReplyDelete

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.