Monday 17 December 2018

Old Thanet pictures

 I think this is The County Skating Rink in Ramsgate now Pettycoat Lane Emporium, My guess is that it was intended to be a ballroom when it first opened but failed to get enough dancers.

As a Rollerskating Rink you can see it had a properly laid floor for rollerskating, I guess it may have doubled as both
 A lot of these have been lifted of Facebook, mostly from people who say please use them
 I think the Custom House was built on this site

 St Peter's I think
 This is looking up York Street from the Harbour end
 This the demolition of The Granvile Ballroom
 Roughly Nero's, once the Marina Theatre, now a car park
 I don't think the date on this one is right
There was a big fire in October 1928 after which the end part was demolished

On to Margate ones from Mick Twyman's collection with his captions
 High St 1912
 High St 1905
Hawley St C1900
 Street Unknown Northdown road far right is norththumberland hall, still there today
 Fire Cecil St
  Fire Market St
  Fire Market St
  Fire Market St
 Fire Market St
 High St 1913
Outing Hawley St

I have been talking to some of Ramsgate and Margate’s young people about local history and whether it interests them. Interestingly for me it seems the answer is basically yes, but the way I present it is difficult to follow.

I think this is partly related to me needing to connect the pictures of the past more to pictures of the present. I think there is also partly a bit of a mental map issue to overcome, I don’t know what age people switch from thinking of the town along the lines of where shops are to street names, but if you say Queen Street, CEX, Waitrose, Homebasics come to mind. However if you say Kwik Fit or Vinylhead you are wrong as Queen Street turns into Westcliff Road or is it West Cliff, just beyond Waitrose.

We also have roads that changed name like half of Plains of Waterloo which was Bellevue Hill, meaning that historic pictures can have a different name for the same place.

 This is the link to books we put out today

 Work wise the bookshop has been trundling along much as expected, there is a bit of a sense of desperation among some of the people shopping for Christmas presents and I guess something of relief encountering a fairly normal shop experience.

   
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1 comment:

  1. P. MarvellDecember 17, 2018 10:41 pm

    Keep up the good work Michael. The Fish Market in Ramsgate was run by a relative of mine who also lived in Kent Terrace. That branch of the family also other fish places in Harbour Street & the Market Place.

    ReplyDelete

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.

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