Using this type of guide, if you are interested in local
history, doesn’t always work out quite how you think it will. A read of the
guide or just coming into my bookshop in Ramsgate and having a good old browse
of it forms different picture to reading a history book. If you, for instance
read Charles Busson’s “The Book of Ramsgate” which was published in 1985 and is
a good history of Ramsgate, one thing you unlikely to get is a picture of
Ramsgate in 1985. Of course back in 1985, Pleasurama was still running,
Ramsgate had a busy town centre and I think most people assumed then – only 32
years ago – that Ramsgate would still be pretty much the same. Guide books are
different to history books inasmuch as they tend to a slightly rose tinted view
of the now back then.
Often it’s the advertisements that tell us a great deal,
however be careful about the addresses, as some of the street numbering and
some of the street names have changed since 1867. Before getting too committed
about this I strongly recommend coming into the bookshops and carefully working
you way back through the street directories while keeping a weather eye on the
1872 map of Ramsgate on the wall next to the directories, so you don’t wind up
venerating the wrong building.
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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.