So starting with the old pictures of Ramsgate and Margate while I tried to think of something to say about Ramsgate seafront development and café culture.
Many thanks to Christopher Sparrow for this carte de visite
So one of his questions was. What is the situation with the commercial properties underneath the Royal Sands?
I think there is a sense where you have to look at the pub restaurant and café culture along the seafront in Ramsgate as a whole.
In recent years it's expanded quite a bit the biggest one lump expansion being Wetherspoons. Just at the moment, with all the pressure on on this particular side of the entertainment sector, it's very hard to see how further expansion of a similar sort of size to Wetherspoons could happen in a relatively short time.
Two major factors in all this will be the hotel which should be being built as the next stage of the royal sands and the two remaining units that are not Wetherspoons but in the royal Victoria pavilion.
As you can see from the picture above only one of the the shop fronts has gone in so far and that is the furthest one along towards Augustus stairs.
All in all I think it will be interesting to see how this all pans out, my guess is that the rents for the commercial units will be fairly high but that the available business there will be both seasonal and weather dependent.
Here at Michaels Bookshop, where I work in Ramsgate, a fairly large batch of books went out for sale today. For book readers here is the link to the photos of the books
There is no doubt that Ramsgate is reviving at the moment, both town centre and harbour front wise and I think there may be some potential to continue the revival along the sands, but in a very seasonal way. In the winter I think apart from people living there with their own parking space, any evening activity will be difficult.
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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.