Archive photos Ramsgate Pier Yard and Margate and the usual stuff

 This is the Harbour Masters House and Harbour Commissioners Meeting Rooms in Ramsgate, it used to be where Pier Yard car park is now, not to be confuse wiht the Custom House on the other side of Harbour Parade

 This the Queens Head on Harbour Parade Ramsgate before it was rebuilt

 A few Margate ones

I did a bit more to my sketch in the pavilion

Spot the difference

Took a few photos this is the link to them

This is the view from where I was painting

Some thoughts about local and national issues, mainly for my own reference at a later date.

Here in Ramsgate, the big issues are Pleasurama, the building site that was the site of the town's main leisure facility, behind the main sands.

Speculation about what is going on with this extends back into the mists of time. Most probably it was some sort of scam related to making money out of the property and I think most likely the scam went wrong.

The rub is that plans for 109 apartments and hotel got approved and because of a technicality in planning law, where as in theory the development has started, instead of the plans expiring the council say they remain valid for ever.

The main difficulty with the plans is the building doesn't seem to fit into the available space height wise, we won't be able to see much, sea no beach when we look over the top of it from Wellington Gardens.

The other issues relate to flood risk from the sea and the state of the cliff above it, which isn't good and has a history of serious collapses.

Port Ramsgate is another serious issue, a big factor here is that any pollution generated by commercial industrial activity blows over Ramsgate because of the prevailing wind direction.

The bottom line commercially is that the transport infrastructure of Southeast England and Northern France has changed in a way that makes it nonviable.

Leisure activity in the adjacent Royal Harbour is viable, makes a profit and this suggests that some sort of conversion to a leisure use, some sort of residential water sport, holiday village use seems to be the better way t go.

I think the problem here is mostly down to the district council which seems to be focused on Margate and the past.

Another major issue are plans to turn Manston Airport into either by the current owners, a mixed use residential and light industrial facility or and attempt to use planning legislation to compulsory purchase the site and to turn it into a major airfreight hub.

I think the main issues with both these plans would be how resultant air, noise and ground pollution would impact on Thanet.

The other major impact here is do either contender have the resources to pull their projects off, particularly do they have access to legitimately sourced funds.

Finally running in the background is the BREXIT issue, and I suppose the main issue for me with that is steering a small business through so it is still there when things settle down.

A bookshop is likely to be affected for a number of reasons, the main one being the relocation of firms that a proportion of my customers work for`

With BREXIT it is not so much that I am particularly concerned about having another level of government, or the freedom of movement affords me personally, that is more for younger people who benefit from freedom of movement in work and education.

I think for me the issue of whether we are unhappy with the method of government we have had the last hundred years is an important one here.

I think perhaps the first stage is to look at this and say something along the lines of. 'Is there anyone who thinks either Labour or Conservatives are so bad that they think we ought to have had a one party state the last hundred years?'

I quite often come across people who say that Labour are bad or the Conservatives are bad, where in terms of world government I consider them both to be pretty middle of the road.

Perhaps the media want to control things so much, and this is part of the cause, I suspect this would fall short of ending freedom of the press.

I am pretty sure that if we are going to go for government by referendum, which would be fairly easy with ITC, then the first referendum should be about whether we want to change from the democracy we have had since about 1920 to governance by referendum`

I think the main snag is how divisive it is, apart from the issue of who carries out the 'will of the people.'

But with all of the above I think the first issue is, can we actually do anything much to first better understand the issues and after that can we actually do anything about the issues above?

Recently I have noticed that there just isn't time to read the documents` the Manston DCO runs to thousands of pages and for this reason I think I favour the principle of voting for some bright spark to read them all and decide for me.

A sign of the times and a sad tale of shopping next

My summer shoes wore out and having tried to buy a replacement pair in the remaining shoe shops, Thanet and Canterbury, I capitulated, found the reference number on the underside of the tongue, put it into ebay and replaced them that way.

Working on the principle that for a lot of men there isn't much to choose between a visit to the dentist and visiting say 10 shoe shops, I can see why there are very few shoe shops left.

We do a fair amount of buying and selling books online, not a huge amount as the books we sell online tend to be ones that have failed to sell to walk in customers in the bookshop. I have to say that the proportion if incidences where online sales and purchases of secondhand books have gone wrong is on the increase again.

This doesn't seem to affect the new local books we sell much and doesn't seem to affect the new books and other new stuff like shoes we buy. It's the secondhand side of internet buying and selling where the issues seem to be. Perhaps it's just me but there you go.

I may ramble on a bit.