Monday 26 December 2016

Two Ramsgate pictures, two Margate and two Broadstairs and a minor ramble.

I suppose that having just finished the Boxing Day meal I do in fact have time to write some sort of blog post, although frankly I have little idea of what to post about.

Ramsgate and Margate’s two main leisure sites Dreamland and Pleasurama are still giving problems. In both cases the council managed to get control of the sites and then relinquish it, which may have been the wrong thing to do.

Perhaps we would be better off with the council running and to a greater or lesser degree subsidising some sort of conventional tourist attraction in both towns. Although to honest I am not really sure how much fairground and amusement arcade attractions contribute to the tourist economy these days.

The Manston Airport site issue is still ongoing, with the mixed-use industrial and residential complex proposed by the current owners still seeming the most likely outcome. The American real estate company’s plans to turn into an airfreight hub didn’t really go anywhere much over the last year, nor have there been any viable contenders for reopening it as a conventional passenger airport. 

Port Ramsgate had a short incarnation as a car import centre, well mostly a storage car park, which seems to be over now from the absence of cars, perhaps we will see it being used for events again, particularly the motorcycle sprint revival.

I recently spoke to the Ramsgate Harbour Slipways leaseholder and gather that Hornby Hobbies are still hoping to have their visitor centre there and the working slipway gained a new operator during the year http://www.burgessmarine.co.uk/slip-way-ramsgate

The main area of local growth still seems to be people relocating to Thanet, I think this is due to a mixture of better roads, the fast train and people working more days with their computer from home. The net result seems to be a slow and steady increase in the number of local residents with higher incomes.


You only have to look at the picture taken on Ramsgate Sands today to see why people would prefer living here.

We have had another reasonable trading year in the bookshop, which I find encouraging.

Of course it’s all very much a case of what can I say about the local area that is in any sense significant news to anyone. 


Anyway here are the old local pictures.









No comments:

Post a Comment

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.