In the High Street again and some Ramsgate Harbour photos too

 

After having walked round Margate main town centre taking photos on Tuesday and finding a ghost town, and I should point out that Margate Old Town was lively and is well worth a visit, I thought maybe I was a bit deluded in some way.

I decided I had better do Ramsgate town centre yesterday, This was between 1.30 and 3 on a Thursday.

All the photos will expand with a bit of clicking. Frankly I was surprised by how busy Ramsgate was with quite a low proportion of empty and seemingly abandoned shop space, a better ratio than Canterbury I reckon. 

Because I work in Michael's Bookshop here in Ramsgate which a busy independent and mostly secondhand bookshop that is also a publisher and printer of Thanet local history books, people often ask me about the problem of getting closed shops open.

I think most people see the main problem being the council and business rates, it's a bit more complicated but here we go.

The business rateable value is what you would expect the rent to be, the valuation is set by the inland revenue, and based on the existing rents of shops nearby. The size and frontage is taken into account.

Business rates are collected by the district council, the money is sent to central government and then shared out among the councils.

Rateable values assume the tenant is responsible for maintaining and insuring the building, back in the day when retail was fairly strong and the interest rate fairly high landlords aimed to get about 10% of the value of the building in rent. Now the proportion would be much lower. This is also complicated because there is a fair amount of shop property let fairly short term with the landlord maintaining the building.

If your rateable value is under 15,000 you qualify for full business rates relief, i.e. you don't pay any rates provided it's your only business property. With shops in Ramsgate that is pretty much all shops apart from the very large ones.

The largest expense by far is wages, 1 worker doing a 40 hour week on minimum wage is about £17,000 per year so it costs about £20,000 per year with the other expenses of employing someone. so if you had 3 workers on minimum wage and a rent of £10,000 per year that would be £70,000 per year add on heat light phone and insurance and you are going to have to find about £2,000 per week just to open the doors.

Apart from prepared food very few shops will produce a profit, in terms of the difference what they pay for a stock item and what they sell it for, of more than a third, meaning that if you have to find £2,000 a week you need to be selling about £1,000 per day of something.

I don't think I need to explain that this isn't happening.

A lot of people work in their own shops, own the building or have very old and low rent leaseholds, some of the shops are occupied by charities, which means reduced rent, rates and staffing costs. 

Well now the fuel bills are going up and people, including me are getting a bit concerned. I see the improvement in Ramsgate town centre as being very fragile.

The High Street was too busy with people for me to use a proper camera, something I had brought with me to do the job. This was a Lumix FZ200 which I hadn't used recently so had a walk round Ramsgate Harbour with it and here are those photos.

Link to the pictures of the books we priced and put out for sale today