A mystery Thanet Picture and some more with a focus on shops now with the answers

 1

The answers are all in the book Camera and Pen 

link to the book

I have photographed the whole adverts which give the addresses in Ramsgate.

Where in Thanet do you think this shop was? I will add the answer, answers here tomorrow

The main theme of this post is local shops. A major interest of mine working in Michael's Bookshop here in Ramsgate since 1987.

 Here is the empty shop that will become the bookshop back in 1987, one thing that attracted me to this site was the abundance of free on street parking around the shop, on Plains of Waterloo, Turner Street, Belmont Street - this was before pedestrianisation so there was a lot more traffic than there is now.

 By about five years ago when this photo was taken, pretty much everything had been double yellow lined, presumably the council was promoting Westwood Cross and was keen to stamp out shopping in Ramsgate.

Strange really though, here in the bookshop, where the price of books has fallen to about a third of what they were (mainly because of the the internet, Amazon and Ebay mostly, driving book prices down) we are taking roughly the same amount of money we were back in 1987. This means we are actually selling about 3 times as many books as we were then.

I put it down to reasonable parking, Staffordshire Street Car Park - OK you have to pay, but your'e pretty much guaranteed to find a space and of course the bus to the railway station stopping almost outside. Sad to say the other factor is the number of bookshop closures.

link to the photos of the books we put out yesterday 

Or to put it another way, what goes in must go out.

 2

I have left some more Thanet shop photos without labels,

 3

this is roughly where Boots and the bank are now, corner of King St and High St

 4

 5

 6

 7
and this of course is the old M&S building in Margate High St before Turner Contemporary was built

 Well the rest are too easy

 Have a close look at this one, click to expand, can you work out what the generator is being used for?

We were buying books and shopping in Canterbury today, I was also trying to master the camera on my new phone (moto g8 plus) difficult as it got darker while pushing a shopping trolley full of books bought from the bookshops there.

the pictures  of Canterbury today should expand if you click on them