Click to expand the historic Thanet pictures, some thoughts on shops and shopping in Ramsgate and of course a Christmas ramble

 So starting with some archive photos of Ramsgate shops.

Of course back in the day Ramsgate was full of, "are you being served" shops, a situation based mostly on shop staff being paid poverty wages and real estate values being relatively low. 

Although Michaels Bookshop where I work in Ramsgate is a secondhand bookshop we do sell new Thanet local history books and maps. That is both the ones we publish and ones published by other people. Mainly though this is a secondhand bookshop and over recent years buying secondhand books for presents has become much more acceptable. Obviously in a lot of cases you can't really tell if a book is secondhand, so there is that aspect too. Anyway one way or another it's a very busy day here. 

I think the main factor is price and as most of the books we sell are cheaper than you can get on the internet we are selling a lot of books and of course with people's financial pressures we are also buying a lot of books. 

With Ramsgate itself this year, the question. Is it Busy? Doesn't have a simple answer. There are certainly a lot fewer non food shops where you can buy something tangible, so not much Christmas shopping round the town.

Christmas celebration wise Wetherspoons in Ramsgate is so busy that it is often difficult to get seats, meaning over 1,000 customers, while many of the other venues are virtually empty. Price again, with the wholesale price of cheap beer just under £1 a pint cheap beer in Wetherspoons is around £2, as you would expect. In most of the other venues cheap beer seems to be over £4 a pint and so they are mostly empty. Back in the 1960s and 70s when I did bar work in Ramsgate, the pump price was roughly double the barrel price so what's going on here doesn't make sense.

With Broadstairs and shopping I suppose that it's Westwood Cross that has substantially less shops every year but does have a lot more in terms of amusements. 


On to Margate 

Not sure if these are brewery staff outing or where outings ended up

This is the entry to the jetty and a view I hadn't seen before

 

And yes here is the jetty.

Happy Christmas all round