I’m a bit worried about this one and not so sure what the
eventual outcome will be, there are really a lot of empty shops in the main
part of the High Street at the moment.
The photos are only of the ones right in what I consider to
be the prime High Street area.
Looking at the various estate agent’s websites the rent and
rates combined for a shop a bit over 1,000 square feet, or roughly the size of
my bookshop, which is something I can equate to seems to vary between around
£700 and £1,000 per week.
My guess here is back in the day when town centre’s were
thriving this sort of rent and rates would be attainable, now I don’t think it
would.
I don’t think there is much point in saying this can’t go on
as I suppose it can, however I do wonder if there is anything anyone can do
about the situation.
Out of the context which we used to have, meaning that
opening say a clothes shop in the high street would have meant it would have
been surrounded by thriving shops and have a good footfall of shoppers and I
think we have to face the fact that this is no longer the case, the options
don’t look so good.
Perhaps the most positive and thought provoking document I have
found online is this on, here is the link
http://thegreatbritishhighstreet.co.uk/pdf/GBHS-Good-Practice-Guide.pdf?2
I suppose staffing one of the shops would also be in the £1,000 per week ball park, plus the other expenses heat light phone insurance.
I think the council's plan was roughly along the lines of turn most of King Street, Queen Street and the top of the High Street into residential, perhaps on the premise that this would intensify shopping activity in the pedestrianised area, well this doesn't seem to have worked.
Perhaps part of the problem is the local councils, should
sorting out this problem be one of their top priorities?
Having said this my bookshop is still doing fairly OK here
are the books that went out on the shelves today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-old-margate-hoy-in-bookshop.html
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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.