Clicking on this picture of Ramsgate in 1809 should make it expand, I know it was produced in 1809 because it comes from "The New Margate, Ramsgate, and Broadstairs Guide 1809"
This is a picture of the title page, fortunately I have copied the whole book and produce a cheap reprint that anyone can buy
this is the link to buy it the free option here is coming to my bookshop in Ramsgate and giving it a thorough browse.
I think this is probably the first local guide to have pictures of the three Thanet towns that we can still identify today.
This is Margate in 1809
and this Broadstairs in 1809, all three large files that should expand well when you click on them a bit, or do whatever you do on your phone or tablet.
The text in the book is informative, up to a point, this is part of the the bit about Margate and the journey there
Contemporary cartoons of the Passage Packet tell a different story
the journey between London and Margate took several days depending on the weather
Contemporary cartoons also tell a different story about sea bathing before teh invention of the swimming costume.
Contemporary art like the Benjamin West of the bathing place at Ramsgate in 1788, which is presumably intended to be a realistic picture of Ramsgate, are some help, note the invalid on the right with his mug to drink the seawater and the professional dunkers ready to immerse him afterwards.
next an lifted from the internet so the won't expand two Ramsgate watercolours from 1801 by John Rubens Smith
Here in the bookshop it was one of those days
when people tell you their house is over 200 years old, both the Paragon and
Nelson’s Crescent, finished around 1800, so yes often they are absolutely
right. But following on from this then people want something, a connection
perhaps to this time. How I explain is another matter altogether. Saying that
they were probably built as rental accommodation for the wealthy who came here
for a medical cure accompanied by their families servants doesn’t seem enough. So
I promised to try to do a blog post about this today.
Here is the link to the books that went on the shelves in the bookshop today.
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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.