Back in the day Ramsgate harbour was built as a harbour of refuge, basically if the weather got too bad, from back in the 1700s Ramsgate harbour was one of the safe havens.
Because it was there other commercial enterprises developed around the harbour, like the boatbuilding yard above
The main commercial business was the fishing fleet which around 1900 was a multimillion pound business.
Due to Ramsgate's geographical location the import export business with the european continent hasn't worked so well.
A lot of the problem relates to the road journey to Ramsgate being more difficult than the one to Dover or the Channel Tunnel.
Most difficult of all though are the shifting sandbanks an their relationship to the shipping lanes making a very different distance to how the crow flies.
Unless of course you are going by hovercraft.
Pollution is another factor, apart from the particulate pollution
this is the the link to one of the wikipedia articles although easiest to think of as premature death and the most likely cause of dementia.
One aspect of pollution is that there are different criteria for existing pollution to those for starting new polluting activities. In the simplest terms, if you have a port or airport producing air pollution that is killing off the people who live upwind of it, then taking measures to reduce the pollution is seen as a good and responsible way of acting.
On the other hand starting something that wasn't there before that produces pollution that kills people is generally thought to be a be a bad thing.
Next some pictures of the fair that went on the Pleasurama site in 2007
And below the fair up and running today
which when all is said and done is a great improvement on the chalk mountain.
This is the link to the rest of today's photos
Something I find interesting about both fairs is that they haven't put rides close to the cliff face although the plans are to put people's homes three metres away from the cliff face.
Ramsgate's only beach hut has returned with two security guards to prevent the youth of today from jumping of the east pier as we did when we were the youth of another day. Obviously this means the youth of today are now jumping off the west pier. I can never understand why the council don't spend the money on a properly staffed diving board instead, perhaps the just don't like young people.
Next
the link to the books that went out in the bookshop yesterday apologies for not posting here yesterday I ran out of time.
Back on the subject of the port and changing it to leisure, I have heard this is the intention of various senior local Conservatives, so lets hope they pull something off.
A timely reminder about Ramsgate Carnival tomorrow
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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.