Oosterschelde schooner today. The Tall Ships visit Ramsgate Harbour in 2007 photos and some sort of Ramble

The Oosterschelde schooner from the Netherlands is in Ramsgate Harbour at the moment, some of the crew/passengers were in the bookshop today and they said they are sailing tomorrow morning, so I popped out this evening to take a photo.

The main part of this post is 350 photos I took when the Tall Ships visited Ramsgate in 2007 the file popped up when saving today's

this is the link to the photos

 The Belgian before is also part of the folder.

Here in the bookshop people have mostly been talking about books and not the forthcoming local elections, I managed to stop a customer from buying book 5 in the Earthsea series before buying books 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Local history wise I had one of those don’t jump too far situations with Victorian street directories. The problem here is that as far back a 1849 you get Ramsgate and Margate streets where the houses are numbered, but often the rating officer changed the street numbers or in some cases like half of Harbour Street in Ramsgate that is now Harbour Parade the street name too.

This can be a bit difficult for the person who has bought a house in Ramsgate and researched their house back to say 1920 and someone else’s house between 1849 and 1920 because the number changed.

The moral here is come into the bookshop and browse very carefully through the later directories.

Here is the link to the books we put out today

A few older Thanet photos next

I will try to do a bit more later, label a few photos and so on

Thanet Election Fever and some old an newer local pictures

First some helpful links for Thursday's council elections. This is mostly based on checking my post from yesterday was sill appearing on the Facebook groups I had put it and realising the posts that various election candidates seemed to be sinking like stones.

Thanet council has published the 'Statements of persons nominated' this should tell you which if any of the candidates you can vote for actually live in your ward. At the very least it should tell you if they live in Thanet.

Here is the link

Who can I vote for should bring up a list of candidates from your postcode.

Here is the link

Isle of Thanet News has the best coverage and unlike the other local papers isn't like opening an arcade game in terms of the advertising that comes up.

so links to their various articles.
Independents

Ramsgate Candidates

Margate Candidates

Broadstairs Candidates

Birchington Candidates

My own take on this election is mainly environmental, I don't want either Port Ramsgate or Manston to have a significant environmental impact on our tourist industry. I am hoping that Ramsgate's port will be turned into a tourist village and not an industrial port facility with the resultant pollution blowing across Ramsgate. The same applies to Manston, I don't want the air and noise pollution from an airfreight hub, nor do I want the housing land that the government say has to be allocated in Thanet to be prime agricultural land.

If you like, my vision of the future of Thanet is based on the way the world is going. I think a lot more people are doing a fair proportion of their work from home, so I would expect more more people to want to relocate here.

I am reminding people that the district council isn't responsible for BREXIT, can't buy and run an airport and has pretty much bankrupted itself trying to run a port, mainly because I don't think many of the members have used port or airport facilities in recent years.

I would think anyone who has travelled to Belgium since the road network improved during the 1980s and 90s would realise that any conventional ferry from Ramsgate is going to be much slower than diving and using either Dover or the Channel Tunnel.

The same applies to anyone who has gone on a foreign holiday by plane recently, using the fast train, underground taking to the right part of a major London airport. Taking your Morris Minor onto the tarmac and walking across to the DC10 is just not going to happen.

I think with the airport in particular I have had a great deal of difficulty in trying to get anything sensible out of people who support the Riveroak freight hub, obviously I don't expect people to have read all of the documents, but I don't seem to be able to find any DCO supporters who have read and are able to discuss Riveroak's 32 page non technical summery. here is the link to it  What would be good would be any dialog from any candidates supporting the DCO who have actually read some of the DCO documentation and are able to discuss it.

For me this choice of candidates, based on a mixture of people I don't want to get in, candidates environmental stance and candidates who have any chance of getting elected, well it's getting a bit slim.

Why the strong environmental stance? To me good environmental practices would be the first stage of pulling some of our political wards including the one I live and work in, from having some of the the worst levels of deprivation in the UK.

on to the old photos, some repeats in the Ramsgate ones as the picture file source was different so they may expand to a different size, maybe better or worse, I don't really know until I click on publish

Note the very narrow gap between the Admiral Harvey in this Victorian photo, also the old Albion Hotel demolished to make way for Madeira Walk I am pretty sure Pizza Express aka National Westminster Bank was built in the last 5 years before 1900

Note the temporary crane railway track used for building the Marina Pool

 This group of Margate Station photos were all taken in 1960

 Nayland Rock in 1880

 Elephant Hill around 1910

 This Margate Tudor House one is dated 1910, note no exposed beams, sash windows sideways and not leaded hinged windows.

A lot of books went out in the bookshop today after a busy Saturday

here is the link

Today's photos include one of the council's little huts

here is the link to the rest of them

A couple of hundred photos taken on a walk in Ramsgate in 2009, palace theatre in 1946, a bit of painting in Canterbury and a few historic Thanet pictures.

 So first Link to the 2009 Ramsgate photos I have been in Canterbury mostly buying books for Michael's Bookshop, which is where I work, today. Yesterday was mostly topping up the science fiction, fantasy, horror section in the bookshop. For the dedicated The Link to the Photos of those Books

I did some more to my latest watercolour sketch of Canterbury

 My view across a sheet of paper looking a bit like this

And the painting which could be considered as a sort of Debenhams memento mori, I bought the books in the lower part of Canterbury's main drag today, where the Oxfam Bookshop is and it is very noticeable how few shops there are there selling ordinary and tangible goods.

I can see some sort of future for the cafe culture here in Ramsgate, even without the majority of the conventional shops. Canterbury though I am not so sure, maybe there enough money in the tourist and student part of Canterbury's economy to support a sort of leisure cafe based culture and maybe not. 

I try to think of something that would work in the difficult buildings that house Debenhams at the moment and it aint easy.

At the moment I consider Ramsgate to be a satellite town with Canterbury as the main shopping centre, the other side of the coin is that I don't see a conventional shopkeeper living above an independent shop working in the way the bookshop works here in Ramsgate.

This next lot of pictures all relate to the Palace Theatre in Ramsgate for the 1946 season