After finishing of yesterdays watercolour from Turner
Contemporary and getting to work this morning – coming round after the weekend
– responding to the Facebook comments, including a don’t like Arlington, which
I suppose a lot of people don’t.
I replied. “ ‘s a bit like sketching people, buildings is.
The ones that some fined inspiring, attractive, wosisname, others don’t. With
the sketching I’m still in the learning phase so really just concerned with
getting a likeness, so a spade looks like a spade and not too shovelish.
My own take on Arlington is that it is an important piece of
brutalist architecture and iconic in terms of defining Margate, therefore
significant in economic regeneration. Assuming Arlington is going to stay and I
guess the residents there would have something to say if all their homes were
demolished, then I think it needs to have listed building status so that the
ground floor has to be redeveloped in the same brutalist style, and that it
doesn’t suddenly get painted magnolia or develop plasic double glazing.”
This did however get me thinking about the Margate skyline
and what makes it distinctive. Obviously and whether you like it or not Turner
Contemporary is very iconic as is Arlington and so is the cinema, for the most
part the Georgian and Victorian buildings are not really peculiar to Margate
with the possible exception of The Imperial (flat iron) viewed from the end and
of course Droit House (modern replica rebuilt after the war.
So what of the Dreamland Cinema, here is the English
Heritage listing https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1260315
Phase 2 of the Dreamland restoration project includes the foyer, and is
underway now, but not much in the way of old pictures of the cinema building on
the internet, so here are some from the 1935 souvenir, I do a facsimile of
this, here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/dreamland_cinema_1935.htm
I am not sure if in all of the Dreamland restoration whether
the cinema comes back into use as a cinema, and whether a cinema in Margate
would be viable even as part of a heritage theme park.
There is also the Nick Evans book Dreamland revived which we
have in the bookshop and is fairly easy to get online.
Finally for the dedicated followers here are the latest acquisitions
in the bookshop http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/devils-and-mermaids-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.