Ramsgate fishing fleet around 1900 photos, some thoughts about Ramsgate as a natural harbour, minor Manston update, out and about and getting to grips with the internet.

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.     

As for the books that went out in the bookshop today, see http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/david-attenborough-in-bookshop.html I think it’s a case of no chance without knowing the web address.