I publish a couple of books a about The Granville in Ramsgate, worth a browse if you visit Michael's Bookshop here in Ramsgate.
The Granville was designed by Edward Pugin as a terrace of large houses for the wealthy, Pugin was a major investor in the project which eventually lead to his bankruptcy.
The houses didn't sell, I think mainly because the UK holiday infrastructure changed from around 1870 from being dominated by the paddle steamer to being dominated by the railway.
Turning The Granville into a hotel wasn't enough to make it really profitable and I would say that when people talk about the decline of Ramsgate and Margate starting in the 60s they may mean the 1960s but the 1860s is more realistic.
Here is the Illustrated London News Granville supplement [advertising] for 1879 and probably the only issue, the pages will expand if you click on them or you can follow
this link and read the whole thing
On to Westgate
The Westgate promotion was a supplement to the Granville one and back in the day something like spam advertising, the developers who had invested in building seaside accommodation at Westgate wanted people to buy houses there.
I was in Canterbury today, partly buying books for the bookshop and partly trying to sketch the towers on top of the cathedral.
I find sketching these much more difficult than I expect
I am pretty sure it would be fairly easy to sketch them from a photo although I haven't tried. From life it's a landscape of shapes, shades and colours where I get lost in the moment between looking up at the tower and down at the paper.
This suites me and to my mind is an activity which slowly improves my sketching - the idea being getting into something like a state of oblivion without getting a hangover, when it goes right - the mind goes off and gets on with sending the instructions straight from the eye to the hand.
Here is the link to the rest of today's Canterbury photos
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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.