Old pictures of Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Margate mostly

 Quite a few of this view looking up King Street in Ramsgate around 1900. I assume they were all taken from the balcony of the town hall. to get your bearings you can see the Red Lion on the right and further to the right the curved top of the building which is now Timpson's. This seems to say something like. 'Largest Retail Premises in the Word.' around 1900. 

 This one is after and I would guess dates from around 1910

 and this one before, a similar view but a bit further in, I would guess around 1870

 This one has a 1903 postmark on it so must have been taken before then

Excuse the rather lazy approach of leaning the photos against my laptop and snapping them, I went to Canterbury to buy some books for Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate, which is where I work.

Working in a shop at the moment and considering the shop closures, and I guess in the last three years Canterbury has lost more conventional retail space selling tangible goods than most towns, with the probable economic decline of a likely bad BREXIT looming. I sketched Debenhams, which lurked in the distance like a huge retail dinosaur, 

while eating my cheese and ham sarni.

I know if I were to go inside, there will be nothing for me to sit on and no wifi that I can get to work. They have the clothes my teenage children would like to buy, but I have the money. I vaguely wonder what proportion of men would rather go to the dentist than engage in this type of shopping.

I did go to Waterstones later, mainly to see which art books had had their shrink wrap removed, it's a funny old world browsing an art section in a physical bookshop where there are a lot of books that you can't actually open.

Shopping online and offline can be a surreal experience. This is the link to the books we put out Saturday  none of them shrink wrapped so you can't look inside them.