I am coming to terms with the fact that there was a time
when the Ramsgate fishing industry was worth about £8m per year in today’s Mars
bars.
My feelings are that Ramsgate must have been a natural
harbour and used by the inhabitants of the village of St Lawrence for some sort
of fishing activity for as long as there have been people here.
I suppose looking at the 1791 engraving of Ramsgate before
most of the development of the town makes it easiest to see the natural
features or the lie of the land and I would think the chalk valley formed in
the last ice age must continue down into the sea. At the end of the last ice
age the big meltdown meant the sea level rose by about 120 metres.
Here are some of my fishing fleet photos which give you some
idea of what the industry developed into.
I haven’t really been keeping up to date with the Manston
DCO as it seems to me to be pretty much dead in the water at the moment, but
there is a fairly new batch of documents relating to RiverOak representatives
getting permission to go onto the site at https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/south-east/manston-airport/?ipcsection=docs
and something that did interest me was this is an official document that has
given a registered address for RiverOak, obviously you can download the
document yourself, but here is what it says.
“"Applicant” means
RiverOak Investment Corporation (Delaware Company No.
3028870)
whose registered office is at
1209 Orange Street, Wilmington, Delaware DE 19802, USA.”
My own take on this is that it probably means they are a
Delaware LLC. A complex issue, but if you want to take it further you have all
the internet resources to hand.
No post yesterday as I have mostly removed myself from the
day to day bookselling, local history book editing, blog and Facebook posting
and been trying to see how the internet has changed in terms of the people who
want to find the things I put there finding them.
With running a bookshop and publishing local history,
neither of which are really profitable there is a sort of grey area where
advertising and promotion merges with the people using the internet finding
what they want to find.
I think art galleries, museums, libraries and theatres find
themselves in this area too. The physical books has changed its place in the
world. With a novel the experience of reading it on various types of technology
and the experience of reading it from a paper book well they are all different.
With paintings and drawings, the experience of going to an art gallery, looking
at an art book or looking at the pictures online, these are all different too.
The visit to art galleries, museums, libraries and bookshops
is becoming a leisure experience outside of the head immersed in the phone,
tablet or computer.
I try to use the internet to enhance what I do for people,
not so much advertising, which normally takes you to the buy it now button, but
something a bit different.
But once I have done this the tricky bit is making it so
that the people who want it can find it in an increasingly commercialised
internet.
A good example of this is the pictures in today’s post, you
put, Ramsgate fishing fleet into google or you put Ramsgate in the 1790s in you
want to be able to find the pictures and possibly even what I have to say about
them. From my end this is a tricky business which I have been trying to
improve.
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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.